KDE Connect is the one "linux" tool where after showing to my partner what it can do she asked me if I could install on her Windows laptop, her tablet, and her phone. It's been extremely practical when exchanging PDFs of (say) traintickets, remote controlling the volume of whichever laptop we connected to the projector for movie night (which was the "tech demo" that convinced her), and so on.
I checked recently to see if there was a version of it for MacOS for my work laptop, and they apparently do have one in development, but right now it's only available through nightly builds. The commitment to cross platform support for this really is impressive!
If it wasn't buggy over tailscale it'd be perfect.
I was travelling for a month and decided to put my sim card in a cheap android phone and connect to it remotely to keep getting SMS 2FA rather than getting roaming. After about two weeks KDE connect over tailscale said the phone didn't exist, so I was glad I'd set up google's remote sms as a backup. (I verified through tailscale it was still connected).
Could another possible reason perhaps be some kind of battery savings setting on the android phone at home? Since you technically didn't open it directly for two weeks.
There’s also an iOS client, though it doesn’t have all features implemented due to limitations in Apple’s APIs. However it’s still the most convenient way to transfer files between an iPhone and a Windows or Linux computer.
It'll work but that will upload your files to the cloud. If you're on cable internet or even DSL, transferring video files that way will take significantly longer than just using the local connection KDE Connect provides.
Of course, there are many local alternatives as well. I just can't see cloud upload features as an alternative to a local network transfer mechanism.
Also when you say: don't trust Telegram, while not saying anything about WhatsApp, you are, on average, pushing people from a solution that isn't proven to be trustworthy to a solution that is proven to be untrustworthy.
Because unless you simultaneously point out that WhatsApp is worse, that is where people will go if they listen to you and avoid Telegram.
I think in this context, WhatsApp is better than Telegram. In Telegram, you'd upload your files in a way that the server can see them. In WhatsApp, the server won't be able to see the contents.
(Even in general, I think that Telegram is no clear win over WhatsApp, and in fact I'd consider it worse in terms of chat message security.)
WhatsApp has a documented history of all kinds of shadyness from uploading unencrypted (yes, unencrypted) backups to Google under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".
I really can't understand why you bright folks here on HN falls for WhatsApps marketing.
E2E means absolutely nothing as long as the messages are siphoned away in broad daylight.
That said: avoid Telegram all you want. But if you mean no one should ever touch it, I hope you are also against physical mail which is way less secure and also email which is way less secure than Telegram.
> WhatsApp has a documented history of all kinds of shadyness from uploading unencrypted (yes, unencrypted) backups to Google under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".
I don't have that backup enabled. Does that mean that WhatsApp is secure for me with everyone who also has that disabled?
I don't see how Telegram is better in that respect; the server sees all messages directly. It doesn't even need a documented backdoor like you described.
> under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".
*EDIT*: Can you give a link to that agreement? It'd interest me. :)
Hi again. Yes, I agree you should ask me, it wasn't as easy to find as I first thought, but here[1] is a thread on HN that discusses it and a bit down the thread you find a link to the Verge [2] which in turn links to the case papers [3].
I admit the links I found now are less clear than I though and I don't have more time now, but there is clearly reason to be suspicious when 1.) Facebook stops encrypting data before upload 2.) Google accept to keep the data without counting it against the users quota 3.) sources claim there was a deal. None of these three carries too much weight on their own but together they paint a picture that something is going on.
You seem like a sincere person so be sure to note that what I found now was less damning than what I thought I would find which suggests either it hasn't turned out so bad or they have covered it well up.
Telegram has a Secret Chat. It's on the 3 dots menu in the screen for a contact. Secret chats are available only on one device, they don't sync to the other devices of the user.
Few years ago i had kde and used kde connect, but i didn't want that much qt in my life (can't stand it), and switched to gnome. There was gsconnect but it wasn't that realiable. Used that for a while but in the end i switched to sway, becaus twms are great and everything is so much snappier. But one thing was missing, kdeconnect. I didn't want qt, and gsconnect was a gnome extension. I tried several other alternatives to, but nothing was as good.
For example the only qt application i use is wireshark, it looks to me like windows 7, hijacks my input several times when i want to type somewhere else, hovering over menu items at the top is always off for me,...
And GTK seems to work better for me with tiling window managers, as popups are by default not windows (idk what they are), this way if I click on something and a popup or dialog comes up, it stays as a popup or dialog and doesn't take up half of my screen and splits my screen.
GTK isn't perfect, but at least it looks good and is more pleasent to use for me.
Floating windows would be something i need to specifically whitelist in my twm config, thats how i could achieve it with qt, but the gtk popups aren't treated like normal windows from the beginning
I've used kdeconnect under various different systems without ever using KDE (well, not since the Konqueror days so it's been a while). It works just fine under awesome, dwm and whatever two of my coworkers are using (some kind of Gnome desktop as far as I know).
Given the state of Linux application naming, we're lucky it's not called GKCellP, so we'd have to find it via 'apt search kdeconnect' every time because we can't remember the name. (I'm looking at you, GKrellM. You too, Liferea. )
I could understand Gnome as an ideological hack back when KDE wasn't completely open source or when Ubuntu pushed beautiful and polished versions of Gnome 2. And when KDE was on version 4.
Today, why would anyone choose anything except KDE?
GNOME, KDE, MATE, LXQt, Xfce, etc each have their own design philosophies, benefits, and detriments. None of them are all-around objectively better than the others.
GNOME does at least get a lot of corporate development and backing to make it integrate into Active Desktop, centrally-managed settings (aka group policy), and accessibility functions. These aspects are rather large reasons that big enterprise distributions default to GNOME over all other choices.
Most users care about none of those features. Some people just like GNOME. Some people like KDE. It's simply a choice.
KDE is much more glitchy compared to GNOME and many other DEs in my experience (but it also has way more features, so that kind of makes sense). Many users don't care about most of those features, so taking the more stable option makes sense.
There also still are big issues in KDE that "just work" on basically every other system (including Windows and macOS). KIO, Akonadi and Baloo come to mind immediately - all great ideas that in reality never really work.
(I say this as someone who daily drives KDE on both Wayland and X11 - to me, the features are certainly worth dealing with the issues)
To me KDE is overloaded with settings and menus, it looks outdated and Gnome leans a lot more into multi-workspace/keyboard controls rather than the Windows-like behavior and I prefer that.
I use KDE because I like its relatively polished design and philosophy of flexibility and empowering power users. I can and I do wrestle things that I don't like into a shape I like.
I still have to put up with many, many downsides around its stability, bugs, resource consumption, being written in C++ and builds being a nontrivial exercise.
I can sympathize with those for whom KDE does not suit well.
What distro do you use and what do you compare it to?
My preferred distro is KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu base but with KDE devs providing the KDE layer on top.
I have found this combination excellent and while I am sure it uses more resources than lightweight distros it actually seems to save me resources when I move load (IntelliJ, VSCode, Cypress) from my Windows host machine to my KDE running under WSL. Even on the limited memory and CPU I give this VM it seems to handle them a lot nicer than when I run the GUI apps in the host machine and only run Maven/Quarkus + Node + WSL part of VSCode on WSL.
And with the most recent update of WSL, running GUI apps from WSL has become effortless. (I admit some rough edges like IntelliJ sometimes freezing after suspend resume etc, but nothing that takes time or effort to resolve.)
GTK != Gnome. KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it. One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.
If you find yourself using the term bloated you should in most cases find a new word because it communications only imprecision. It neither uses excessive RAM, nor requires excessive storage, nor runs slowly. Do you mean it has too many features?
In the context of the prior comment which was choosing between Gnome and KDE the fact that applications require you to have half of KDE is meaningless as you are if you pick KDE going to install all of KDE already.
In the context of installing KDE apps outside of KDE this is fairly overblown. Most people have hundreds of GB to TB of storage available and will install games which require 60GB. At this point in time worrying about KDE installing a few gigs of deps is like worrying about the difference in ram used by Emacs vs Vim.
> KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it.
I use GNOME myself but GNOME is anything but lean and stable - Alt+F2 r is for me a staple and it doesn't work correctly under Wayland, it's GUI is horribly slow, every extension worsening the problem. I mostly only use GNOME myself because I stopped caring about how slow things are and I'm lazy.
> One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.
Well, any GNOME thing wants to pull the entire GNOME thing AND systemd. Much worse.
Gnome doesn't need any more KDE Connect clients. GSConnect is pretty much perfect and most importantly, is integrated into the Quick Settings. What I have always been puzzled by is the near absence of KDE Connect clients for tiling compositors. I would love to one day use KDE Connect in a way that feels native for something like Sway.
Other desktops exist that use GTK. Such as Mate, which is still a very decent desktop and show just how far Gnome has fallen in the past decade. Some of us are very happy to have an application which will work for us that doesn't require pulling in Gnome's junk or KDE's junk.
As far as I can tell, Zorin's connect apps are just forks/rebrands of various KDE Connect apps. KDE connect worked flawlessly with a Zorin VM last time I tried it.
You know, reading the article would have answered your question, saving your time, my time from (voluntary) responding, and everyone else who reads this comment and subsequently also responds it.
I don't mean to be harsh, but really? There is entire bullet point list on the page, and yes, I didn't include it in my response. Ironic.
> KDE Connect provides various features to integrate your phone and your computer. It allows you to send files to the other device, control its media playback, send remote input, view its notifications and may things more. It is available for (mobile) Linux, Android, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS.[1]
Actually I read your response, then I read the article and still came away confused as to what it does, and I use Linux and KDE as the daily driver for work. So now you’ve wasted my time finding the answer to the question instead of just answering a question likely a lot of people will have. Yes, op could have googled that information themselves. However, the valid criticism of OP is that upon having that question they should have googled the answer and then posted their question with the answer proactively. But “did you even RTFA” is not a helpful meta discussion to have. It’s useful to check the comments first to see whether TFA is even worth reading so having this answered about a more obscure piece of software seems totally valid. And someone did paste the bulleted list of features for Valent itself in this thread too so the rhetoric is just a bit too sanctimonious at chewing out a fellow person without providing value to everyone else reading your comment.
It's a phone app that allows control of your desktop. you can control music, send files, use the camera from your phone to get pictures on the desktop, etc
How does it work? What apps are compatible? How is the connection between devices set up? Wire guard? If not, then what?
How does it control apps and receive notifications?
At first it sounded to me like an alternative X11 thing
I hate it when projects/products only state what you can do (or at least what they envision), and not explaining the actual workings. Especially when data and access gets more and more important.
Same with I think it was postbox.. nice app, but they didn’t tell you that they need full access to your account, store “securely” on their server.. no thank you.
KDE framework has KIO library which provides network-transparent file access (that's why Konqueror works a file manager and a browser simultaneously). IIRC the author of KDE Connect was tinkering over sending notifications to a phone app and found out you can make much more with it.
> How is the connection between devices set up?
The server part uses 1716/UDP for broadcasting it's presence and 1716-1764/TCP to communicate with clients. The client had to be paired with server (like in Bluetooth), the communication is done via TLS, file browsing works over SFTP.
> How does it control apps and receive notifications?
Everything is done via plugins, both sides choose which ones are enabled and some have their own control schemes (i.e. whitelist of apps to sync notifications from phone).
it integrates in the desktop UI (and standard protocols, e.g. D-Bus, the "share as..." feature, etc) & phone UI (and standard protocols, e.g. MPRIS, the Android "share" feature, etc), it's mostly not about apps but about the shell, although some apps have nice additional integrations through extensions, like firefox.
For instance:
- when I copy on my linux desktop I can paste on my phone
- I can share links, files, etc between phone and desktop trivially (through the usual android feature on the phone, and through right-click in my desktop)
- when I have media playing either in my desktop media player or in web browsers I can control the playback from the phone
- I can use my phone as a remote control when I give talks & presentations
- I see my phone notifications on my desktop
etc
It's really the only thing that makes Android remotely tolerable for me.
I am quite the opposite, many projects now just have a wall of text about the technology they use, but completely utred to explain in simple terms what it does. It seems some devs assume that everyone can guess from the tech stack. By all means have a page explaining the technology, but the front page should tell me what I can do with it.
Well you need both.. What does it do and why. And then how. The how needs to be somewhere if it's not something super standard, and even then I think it's best to explain. Because things are simply not obvious.
It is a way for your phone to interface with your computer, allowing bidirectional notifications, media control, clipboard and file transfer.
It works VERY well. The app itself mostly stays out of the way and things "just work". No noticeable latency even using the remote keyboard functionality.
