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Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

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Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#45
post #20

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

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.

Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iP…

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?

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.

Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#49
post #34

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 softwar…

> 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.

Re: Things You Can Do with KDE Connect on Linux

#50

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 softwar…

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…

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

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