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Comment by unstuck3958 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

> 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.

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