Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

makeuseof.com

134 pointsjlpcsl62 comments

KDE Connect is a great piece of software. Everyone I recommended it to uses it almost daily.

It makes me wonder about the state of FOSS software: there are plenty of genuinely good FOSS apps that can, in theory, be a part of a FOSS "ecosystem." But not many people actually know about them or use them.

While I am still curious to know why this is, it seems like "advertisement" is still the greater predictor of software usage than anything else (including functionality and ease-of-use). Which is sad (especially because FOSS apps get better the more people use them).

Unfortunately my recent experience with the Windows version was negative. I installed KDE Connect so I could link it with my Steam Deck but the text on the Windows version was completely screwed up to the extent that the UI was completely unusable.

After Googling it seems a work around was to disable hardware acceleration but I was reluctant to do that.

I wanted to revert back to an earlier version (which apparently didn't suffer from thsi bug) but there's no repository for old versions.

The Chocolatey package manager for Windows can install old versions of software from its package repo. KDE Connect is listed as a trusted package, with the oldest available version being 1.4.422 (added in December 2020):

https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/kdeconnect-kde#ver...

Would you mind filing a bug report in KDE's bug tracker for the issue you experienced, if it hasn't already been reported?

https://bugs.kde.org

Thank you, that's interesting to know. And yes, I will.

I had the same experience until I rolled back the Windows display zoom from 150% back to 100%. It does make using the app a chore and I end up using it less than I would otherwise.

Ah so that's the culprit. I should have thought of trying that! I'm using a 1440p screen on a 15" laptop so I'm definitely not running at 100% zoom except for certain known apps that demand it. I'll try that and add it to the bug report.

Thats because the point is we should not need an "ecosystem" in the first place in the sense that it is meant regarding commercial products. Everything is generic files and tools that can operate on them. No special "drmed/cloud app only file" or weird hoops to jump through to transfer files like iphones etc. You can use any tool you want to copy data or work on it. "Ecosystems" in commercial products are necessary because they don't want to make the data available generically so they build you special tools that only work with their stuff or make a deal to provide a limited interface with another company's product etc.

Edit: We use terms like 'js ecosystem' or 'python ecosystem' but that means a different thing from what ecosystem generally means with commercial products.

That a program like kde connect is necessary to communicate between a bunch of general purpose computers is the real funny thing. Its great that this software exists, but the reason it has to exist in the first place is depressing.

It's not necessary to do that, it's just convenient. I haven't tried KDE connect because I assumed that it was cloud-connected and I already do most of that using other tools anyway.

But KDE Connect would certainly be a more convenient method. Now that I know (or think?) it doesn't depend on third party servers, I'll give it a try.

The mouse sharing with phones sounds interesting, I would like to try out kde connect for that feature.

it's also nice that you can use speech to text on your phone, directly to the Linux, macOS, Windows, machine.

There's a lot of space between "necessary" and "convenient" here. Sure, if you know how to root the phone and program it you can do literally anything.

But the bigger and more important point is that Android and Apple (whoever the parties are) have perhaps subconsciously colluded to exclude simple and important functions on our phones -- which are no longer "general purpose computers" -- if ANY of these machines are. E.g. anything convenient that the Apple ecosystem machines can do should be readily available anywhere.

Or to better generalize it, how I use my phone and computer ought to be limited only by the machine and my imagination. There should nearly literally be no such thing as a feature I wish for that I can't have, period.

The "wonderful" thing about the profit motive is no collusion is necessary. There will be natural gravity towards inclusion and exclusion of particular features.

Innovation centers around potential profit.

See, someone's going to read this and nod "yes, this is why open source doesn't matter at all"

The big plus, in immediate terms, is that you can extend it.

Pushbullet gives you similar features, across any 'regular' set of devices. Being closed source though is simply a way to justify a subscription, and datamine their paying customers.

> While I am still curious to know why this is

No marketing budget.

> it seems like "advertisement" is still the greater predictor of software usage than anything else

It is not. It's only a blocker if an app doesn't have any presence at all.

> FOSS apps get better the more people use them

Not true. Only users who report bugs bring value.

> Only users who report bugs bring value.

While bug reports are great, isn't this fairly trivially untrue? Consider something like firefox, where size of userbase directly translates into practical usability w.r.t. webdevs having to care about cross-engine compat. Similar dynamic with things like bittorrent or tor.

For a one-off non-networked app you might be right, but that statement in general seems far too strong.

Users who fix bugs bring value, users who report bugs, create a workstream. Arguably, a large user base brings more value than average quality bug reports.

> 6. Locating Your Misplaced Phone […] This feature is a great alternative if you don’t have an Apple Watch that you can use to ping your iPhone.

That doesn't actually work for iPhones, since (per Apple restrictions) KDE Connect has to be running in the foreground to do anything useful.

It's still my go-to file transfer app, although it would be nice if it were available from the iOS share button.

Point #3 (Using Your Phone as a Mouse and Keyboard) mentions utilizing the gyroscope. I've had that idea in the back of my head for years and years and am super excited somebody actually built it. Looking forward to trying this out.

If it works well enough to actually use I'm gonna be turning heads at the next in person meeting. :)

9. setting up wireguard and kde-connecting over the internet!

> 6. Locating Your Misplaced Phone

I've had an issue many times, in which my phone (possibly to save battery?) is not KDE connected when I need it; usually after not touching it for several hours...

So I recommend disabling energy saving feature for the KDE connect app. Nonetheless, it's strange, I blame Android for optimizing this functionality into uselessness (for battery's sake probably, but I really dislike this new trend of "uncofigurable" devices).

Tailscale works great for this use case, in me experience. Very plug-n-play.

I'd love KDE to implement a server dependent version with both a subscription and a self-hosted version. If I understand push notifications properly they could be used to keep it sleeping until it's "notification time", connect and do it's thing. Since there's always a push connection active with your phone it wouldn't increase battery consumption

I agree, I'd love KDE Connect to support UnifiedPush.

I've used the clipboard sync for the past so many years and it works "flawlessly" and transparently.

It just works.

Ctrl+c on your PC, paste on your mobile.

Same on the other side.

I can confirm, though it's more like 5:1 hit-miss ratio for me (specifically for the copy paste feature) but that could be because of agressive battery optimization I do. I also use it daily for effortless file transfer, and so much more: it truly has enhaced my desktop experience to another level. For example, I can play a YouTube video on my PC and have it pause when I recieve a phone call - all without any kind of physical intervention.

Makes me wonder how many more people who are waiting for AirDrop alternatives haven't tried KDE Connect. Or about the state of FOSS in general.

Also, feels good to see a fellow Kashmiri on HN :)

I have battery optimization disabled for KDE apps, itinerary, connect, neochat.

That helps I guess and now that you mention it, it's the first thing on a new phone so I don't see problems.

The auto-play pause also works transparently.

I'd say the idea of marketing is important. If someone is using Linux, they are already in a niche and you kinda get to know everything.

OTOH, a random windows user who is using it for the first time or someone who uses it in office or for kids, its very hard for them to be exposed to Foss apps.

I mean i've installed libreoffice on hundreds of computers and people still want "ms office". Same for newbies who want first time internet, I show them ddg or something and they expect "show me that google".

Usually when I show DuckDuckGo to someone I start with the bangs, so if they want me to search Google, I show them that use !g in my query, then I do a few searches on other sites like YouTube !yt and Bing !b and Google Image Search !gis so they see what, to me, is the biggest selling point. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs?q=

Yeah. Thanks. I was a long time lurker, read years and only back when the incumbents flipped a switch, I had to take some action.

Yep, mostly works great. The only thing that bugs me is that passwords I copy from KeepassXC get transferred as well, but not deleted from mobile.

I was also concerned about having all my clipboard text copied to my mobile, but you can define a keyboard shortcut to do that only deliberately

please share the whole workflow. your comment has me excited

I'm using GSConnect on Ubuntu. I have first disabled "Clipboard Sync" to avoid it transferring every clipboard content. Secondly, there are a number of actions for which keyboard shortcuts can be defined for a device [1]. One of them is Clipboard Push. I assigned Shift+Ctrl+Alt+V to that, so whenever I execute that contrived key combination, the clipboard is synced to my mobile. I suppose the Plasma implementation has a similar feature.

[1] https://github.com/GSConnect/gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect...

Worth mentioning that KDE Connect can run on Windows as well.

I tried it out on Windows 10 but the mouse input is so laggy it's unusable. Looks like this bug has [already been reported](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440744).

Yeah, I probably should have included a disclaimer that not everything works as well as it does on Linux. I mostly use the notification mirroring and file transfers, and those have both worked fine for me.

and macos, it works very well.

Related question: what is the situation of getting photos from iPhone to a Linux PC? Is it possible?

Or any other file, there are methods but not as convenient as airdrop.

I don't understand why someone would choose a computing device that traps them as much as apple devices do. Every time I've tried to get a file off of one, which is something so incredibly basic it should be easy to do, it's next to impossible without using their shitty iTunes software. Why can't a file system just be a file system? Why does it need to be this nonsense?

The last time I tried this I was mounting an iPod as a filesystem and everything had nonhuman read bale names and there were a bunch of weird formats.

Why on earth is apple so hostile to users?

Does the iphone let you run an http or ftp server on the device? If so its actually alright, I prefer copying files over lan over fiddling with cables anyways generally. But it is funny how copying files with a cable is not possible with it.

What do you suggest? I'm happy with my recent switch to linux desktop but for phones there aren't many options, is android any better?

> is android any better

In this specific respect, most definitely yes.

Absolutely, android phones allow you to actually control the user space software on the device. The whole baseband processor thing is another topic but overall android allows much greater ownership and control

Yeah, probably the #1 reason I use (de-googled) Android over anything else is easy access to the filesystem coupled with allowing background work. I can have Syncthing or Nextcloud passively slurp all my photos in the background while keeping my Keepass db updated.

No idea if it would work on iphone, but on my android setup, I use syncthing to sync photos from my phone to my NAS server.

If you use icloud, you can backup all your icloud photos locally.

Checkout icloud_photos_downloader[1], they have a docker container that is drop-dead simple to use.

I run this[3] about once a month, I could probably automate it, but that feel like it'll take more time than it'll save[2].

[1] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1319/

[3]

  #!/bin/bash
  mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null

  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then
      exit 1
  fi
  
  podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \
      -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \
      -v $(pwd)/cookies:/cookies \
      -e TZ=America/Boise \
      icloudpd/icloudpd:latest \
      icloudpd --directory /data \
      --cookie-directory /cookies \
      --folder-structure {:%Y/%Y-%m-%d} \
      --username mysuperduper@username.com \
      --password "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" \
      --size original

KDE Connect. That's the feature I use most. Open KDE Connect on the phone, select the target computer, ‘Send Photos and Videos’, select the photos, and hit ‘Add’. They end up in a configurable directory on the host.

I previously used USB or SFTP apps, but neither is as convenient.

If libimobiledevice is installed you can mount the filesystem directly in your filemanager and copy them over.

On plug-in you'll have to hit the Trust button on the iOS device.

There has been a weird bug for a while, if you see "afc://badcafe:3" in the location bar, remove the ":3" at the end to see a proper view of the DCIM folder.

9. Mute speakers when receiving or making a call on the phone.

10. Share files directly between Android devices without going through my laptop.

I use KDE Connect to share books and papers from my computer to my tablet, so I can annotate them with a digital pen. It's pretty nice.

Occasionally I'll do the same from my phone, and it works as long as you share your mobile connection.

Does GNOME have a similar feature? I am not a big fan of how busy KDE is.

You should be able to use KDE Connect without the rest of KDE. I don't know how heavy the deps are, but it should really just be disk space wasted mostly.

KDE Connect is not restricted to KDE Plasma. It's an app, so it is available for Windows, Linux, and even iOS.

GSConnect was a rewrite for the GNOME shell, but I think it's been 'depreciated' in favor of Valent. You can try both and see which you prefer:

GSConnect: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

Valent: https://valent.andyholmes.ca/

Have you used Valent? Is it fairly feature comparable to KDE Connect? I use real KDE Connect on Gnome but it's pretty clumsy

I haven't used Valent (since there's no stable release yet), but I can vouch for GSConnect. It's a feature-complete KDE Connect client that seamlessly integrates into GNOME Shell as an extension.

Its not deprecated, both are still supported

On my mac, the connection keeps disconnecting. Only way is to restart on mobile(android) and then on mac. Does anyone experience this? Any solutions.

Interesting. It even has a native SailfishOS integration.

However, last commit a year ago. Oh, well, I guess that's not a huge surprise.

I use it daily. To be quite honest I don't see what needs to be done more beyond security and compatibility fixes. I never had it crash and I honestly can't think of a feature I would like it to have that it doesn't. Sometimes software is complete.

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