Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedrovhb | Hacker News Reader

I started using KDE Connect via the Gnome extension just a few days ago, and it's been great so far. I have my phone muted all the time because notification sounds annoy me, but I don't mind the desktop notifications. I've been missing a lot less due to this, and it works instantly and seamlessly, and I spent almost no time configuring it all.

Just earlier today I had my phone playing music connected to a bluetooth speaker. I was just getting to my computer and out of habit, hit the volume down media keys. I was surprised for a second when it worked, because immediately after hitting the key I remembered the speakers were connected to my phone, not the computer. Then I realized it was KDE Connect just working :)

View on HN

I had a moment like that when I received a call. My smart watch sent a pause command to the playback notification, which was KDE connect, connected to my PC's audio player, which was controlling Kodi on my TV, pausing it nearly instantly.

A single pause command bridged four devices and it all just worked together. That's the true power of interoperable software standards.

Sadly, Google added a privacy constraint to Android, taking away the ability to monitor the clipboard in the background with no way to bypass the restrictions without rooting your phone. Automated clipboard sync was just great, and I'm sad to see it go.

I too enjoyed clipboard sync and am sad it's gone, but it still works for the desktop → phone direction, and for transferring text in the opposite direction, I select it and "share" it with KDE Connect, which puts the text into a .txt file on the desktop and displays it. (In my case it's using a pager in a terminal window, I guess that's how my file handlers are set up?)

It's not as magical as full automation, but still better than sending an email to myself or similar nonsense.

Also a cool thing is that it will automatically pause your music playing on your computer, when you get a call. And resume it, when you end the call.

Also can wake your monitors when you're connected to wifi! Took me a few months before I realized that my displays would sleep themselves if I was disconnected, walked in one day with wifi disabled, enabled it and my monitors popped up

Reply on news.ycombinator.com