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KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

community.kde.org

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Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#31

Post by seszett »

m463 wrote: post #18
creatonez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has bluetooth support now as well

it also talks about using a VPN and what ports to open in a firewall. I don't know how it handles the harder part, the "device on internet" talks to "device in my house" most phones and apps use this "harder part" to interpose their corporate server for more than TURN/STUN and continue to "collect all the data" or "insert a subscription"

> the "device on internet" talks to "device in my house"

It doesn't handle it well other than with bluetooth or awkward port forwarding and manual entering of IPs.

I don't see it as a problem though, I don't think I have needed a single time over my many years of use to share my clipboard with, or control the media player or mouse and keyboard, of a device that was not in the same room or on the same network as me.

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#32

Post by geokon »

roshin wrote: post #12

when it works it's amazing. but very often both my phone and laptop are connected to the same WiFi, yet kde connect can't see them. I can't figure out how to diagnose and solve that when it happens

Very typical for my KDE experience. Things break and it's impossible to figure out what's gone wrong b/c there is no additional information/logs/diagnostics exposed to the user. Everything to do with Networking and Bluetooth is plagued by this (though to be fair things break a lot less than ~5 years ago)

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#33

Post by jeroenhd »

roshin wrote: post #12

when it works it's amazing. but very often both my phone and laptop are connected to the same WiFi, yet kde connect can't see them. I can't figure out how to diagnose and solve that when it happens

It should work on any network where mDNS works and where TCP connections can be established. There's not much going on that's more complicated than that when it comes to device discovery.

Many VPN configurations break mDNS and other broadcasts (i.e. Chromecast, file shares, that kind of thing), though. A lot of "how to get started with WireGuard/OpenVPN/etc." guides stop the moment HTTP(S) connections work, but there's more to a functional network than that.

I found that I could get KDE Connect working on my buggy VPN profile by manually specifying remote IP addresses for devices on the other end of the VPN in the settings.

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#34

Post by marcu123 »

KDE Connects works amazingly for me. I get, once in a bluee moon, the random "Can't see the other device" bug. I have solved it with the basic dis/connect to the wifi both on my phone and computer. Also, check your Firewall on your computer. Some distros will not "Auto add" KDE Connect to the exception list of your Firewall. Some routers also put LAN and WLAN devices on different VLANS.

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#36

Post by jeroenhd »

Oxodao wrote: post #21
m463 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it also talks about using a VPN and what ports to open in a firewall. I don't know how it handles the harder part, the "device on internet" talks to "device in my house" most phones and apps use this "harder part" to interpose their corporate server for more than TURN/STUN and continue to "collect all the data" or "insert a subscription"

Did you get this to work with wireguard though? As long as my phone is connected to wireguard KDEConnect does NOT see any other computer, apparently because it wont forward ICMP broadcast according to the internet. I would really like to have a solution to this issue but since its baked in WG i don't think this is possible

WireGuard doesn't do any forwarding out of the box, you need to set up your iptables/nftables to get all of that working. If you follow the WG quick-start guides, they often work by masquerading traffic, making VPN clients act the same way a bunch of computers behind a NAT router would.

You'll need to set up all other kinds of routing as well for cross-network discovery to work. WireGuard doesn't do broadcasting in general (it's a point-to-point protocol after all) so you'll need to wrap broadcasting protocols manually.

Other VPNs go more low-level (at least in TAP mode), mirroring an ethernet network with all the broadcasting and low-level protocols you can think of. In theory you could do that in WireGuard (running L2TP over a WireGuard link) but many phones won't support that, and it'd probably be just as easy to set up an OpenVPN/IPSec+L2TP VPN in that case.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea, though. I imagine most people wouldn't want a printer publishing its mDNS hostname to wake the 5G radio on their phone, or the battery level of their laptop in the case of KDE connect.

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#37

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

cromka wrote: post #15

Is there any update on whether Apple had already opened their iOS API in EU, which would allow to match the KDE Connect's Android functionality?

I remember getting excited about KDE Connect but then being completely disappointed that it basically non-functional on iOS...

As I remember it (tried it last year I think), the application needs to be in the foreground in order to do anything at all, because of Apple's (purposeful) limitations of doing things in the background.

So if you were hoping to be able to install this and sync stuff without effort and having to leave the app open all the time, Apple seems to be vehemently against anything like that, probably because they have their own solutions for this...

Edit: The GitHub repository actually goes through the Apple-induced problem:

> iOS is very much designed around foreground interactions. Therefore, background “daemon-style” applications don’t really exist under conventional means, so the behavior where KDE Connect iOS is unresponsive in the background is more or less intended. There are technically some special categories and "hacky" methods to try to get it to run in the background, but in general, there is no intended/by-design method of keeping a "daemon-style" app running forever in the background. For more information, see this post on the Apple Dev Forums

https://github.com/KDE/kdeconnect-ios

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#38

Post by jeroenhd »

m463 wrote: post #23
Oxodao wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get this to work with wireguard though? As long as my phone is connected to wireguard KDEConnect does NOT see any other computer, apparently because it wont forward ICMP broadcast according to the internet. I would really like to have a solution to this issue but since its baked in WG i don't think this is possible

Actually, I mean the whole "find and talk to my home server over the internet" Generally it does this by having a DNS record for your home server, or having some other well-known server give out its address or relay the packets.

KDE Connect leverages mDNS on the network (non-Bluetooth) side, which relies on broadcasts. That means it'll break across networks without a VPN of some kind. For some VPNs (Wireguard, OpenVPN in TUN mode) that also means connectivity is impossible.

You can, if you want, open ports and configure KDE connect to reach out across the internet (practically only feasible with one device behind your router on IPv4, any on IPv6), but because it doesn't use "real" DNS, you can't just enter a DDNS hostname, you have to specify the full IP address.

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#39

Post by munchlax »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #6

This is a killer app. There have been times when I asked someone "why can't you just send me a screenshot on signal" or "Oh, can't you copy the URL to your desktop?"... only to realize that the poor fellow didn't have KDE connect (yet). It's not perfect, but it does things I haven't found anywhere else, makes your phone and laptop and pc. It might help that I'm actually running KDE everywhere, of course.

> KDE everywhere

Not to be confused with Qt Everywhere

Re: KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

#40

Post by Joel_Mckay »

sphars wrote: post #4

> enables all your devices to communicate with each other I've tried using KDE connect on two desktops (my laptop running Fedora KDE and my desktop running Nobara, also Fedora KDE) and this statement appears false. It was extremely buggy connecting them, and when they did "see" each other, none of the functionality I expected worked. Wanted to use the shared clipboard feature but it didn't work, nor did anything else…

SSH File sync applications are reliable...

Android: "Transfer Files To Computer, PC" ( Michal Bukáček includes GPL git URI, YMMV as we still need to audit it for traffic)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.bukacek.fil...

iPhone: PhotoSync is free to transfer movies and low-resolution images

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosync-transfer-photos/id41...

MacOS:

https://github.com/macfuse/macfuse/releases

Windows 11: sshfs is slow, but allows user account constrained access to remote shares

winget install -h -e --id "WinFsp.WinFsp"

winget install -h -e --id "SSHFS-Win.SSHFS-Win"

https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win

Windows 11 system tray sshfs link manager:

https://github.com/evsar3/sshfs-win-manager

Windows 11: Local OpenSSH service setup

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

If your home router is dynamic DNS only, the ISP will usually still support ports >1000:

https://www.noip.com/

Or DIY with your own DNS solution with cloudflare:

https://linuxconfig.org/automate-dynamic-ip-updates-for-your...

Also tried KDE connect a few years back, but didn't like the idea of giving a buggy phone access to shoulder-surf root accounts. Transferring stuff out of a VM with a local samba instance also works, but samba should also be containerized.

Best regards, =3

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