I started using KDE Connect via the Gnome extension just a few days ago, and it's been great so far. I have my phone muted all the time because notification sounds annoy me, but I don't mind the desktop notifications. I've been missing a lot less due to this, and it works instantly and seamlessly, and I spent almost no time configuring it all.
Just earlier today I had my phone playing music connected to a bluetooth speaker. I was just getting to my computer and out of habit, hit the volume down media keys. I was surprised for a second when it worked, because immediately after hitting the key I remembered the speakers were connected to my phone, not the computer. Then I realized it was KDE Connect just working :)
I had a moment like that when I received a call. My smart watch sent a pause command to the playback notification, which was KDE connect, connected to my PC's audio player, which was controlling Kodi on my TV, pausing it nearly instantly.
A single pause command bridged four devices and it all just worked together. That's the true power of interoperable software standards.
Sadly, Google added a privacy constraint to Android, taking away the ability to monitor the clipboard in the background with no way to bypass the restrictions without rooting your phone. Automated clipboard sync was just great, and I'm sad to see it go.
I too enjoyed clipboard sync and am sad it's gone, but it still works for the desktop → phone direction, and for transferring text in the opposite direction, I select it and "share" it with KDE Connect, which puts the text into a .txt file on the desktop and displays it. (In my case it's using a pager in a terminal window, I guess that's how my file handlers are set up?)
It's not as magical as full automation, but still better than sending an email to myself or similar nonsense.
Also can wake your monitors when you're connected to wifi! Took me a few months before I realized that my displays would sleep themselves if I was disconnected, walked in one day with wifi disabled, enabled it and my monitors popped up
About your point about a better marketing, as a KDE developer and member of the small KDE Promo team, I completely agree with you. Unfortunately like most of open sources projects, our budgets and manpower is very small. If someone is interested to help our promo team, feel free to join: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Promotion. We always need more help with writing and proofreading announcement texts, maintaining the websites, doing videos, writing tweets/toots, ...
One of the unfortunate things I run into on social media is this idiotic perception that KDE is bloated and cumbersome, then when you drill down into the argument, you often find that these same people haven't used it for 10-15 years.
I'm not sure how you can fix branding perceptions that are based on fallacious experiences that weren't updated in the last decade, but I think some manner of user evangelism can also help!
I've got a couple old laptops from 2007/2011 era - are you talking about KDE Plasma or a different DE? I'm down to try just about whatever you recommend.
I run KDE Plasma on a 10 years old underpowered tablet (1G RAM, Intel Atom 1.66 GHz, slow SSD - 32G too) [1]. Anything else is unusable on this tablet. It is slow but it works. Xfce and LXDE are probably lighter, but were barely usable on it when I tried and I'm not sure they would be so much faster. Browsers and apps are certainly what eats your RAM, and with KDE you get apps that share a lot of code in memory. Xfce / LXDE don't provide many things so you will need some Gnome or KDE apps anyway.
I wouldn't bet that Xfce is that much lighter than Plasma nowadays (but definitively disable features like search indexing on slow hardware). On 2G of RAM, you probably should choose between KDE, LXDE, XFCE, maybe MATE (or lighter environments), the one you like the most. I can't say for Cinnamon ; probably fine. Gnome is probably too heavy.
If a person used KDE 10 years ago and it was bloated, and I haven't used it since, I don't think it's fair (or helpful for that matter) to use terms like 'idiotic' when trying to convince someone to give the project a second chance.
Their use of the term is not meant personally I'm sure, but for anyone applying insights that are ten years out of date in a fairly rapidly changing field of software like this, they are hardly going to win awards for being smart are they?
This happens too much with software - look at various open source filesystems that had reliability issues in the early days (which is pretty reasonable), someone writes a piece that highlights this and years later people are still parroting it as current insight - with the downside being that it can crush a project and thus in time make a self fulfilling legacy.
KDE has always been the most bloated in the initial install. However when you actually try to do something you discover that whatever the environment they are all about as big, with KDE being the smallest since they trade initial bloat for in use leanness.
Not trying to hate on KDE, I know many people who love it, but I have found it less performant on old hardware than Xfce. (Maybe its a cpu/GPU rather than ram thing?) I started using Linux last year, and tried KDE last month.
If the hardware is really old to not br able to support animations properly, just disable those animations. Transparency effects can be disabled as well. Everything. It is by far the lightest and most efficient DE
I've been running KDE Neon for about a year, and have to say it's about the best put together DE I've experienced in over 15 years. And KDE Connect is the bee's knees. Everything really does just work. I'm totally impressed with you guys. Kudos.
Indeed, better marketing would be good. I was so burned on the KDE 3->4 transition I haven't been back since, even though that was a very long time ago. And clearly from the article, they're doing some pretty fantastic stuff now! Gotta get in and try it out again!
You missed out on the Plasma5 transition. It surprises me how no one eyed Gnomr for the mess Gnome 3 was. Gnome 40 is a mess as well, trying to reinvent the UX.
But KDE's desktop gets criticized for what it was when it tried 3D graphics at a time when Qt wasn't ready.
I don't use gnome, so I have no knowledge there. Just going my experience of going from what I considered the perfect desktop (KDE3) to what I considered a major downgrade. I'm glad KDE is good again!
> Can I send/receive the same messages I received on my iPhone?
Nope. Apple doesn't extend their messaging protocols to developers like that. But it does work perfectly fine on Android! There's both a QT5 and GTK interface for it, both of which are pretty fully featured and actively developed, and it syncs with your phones messages over WiFi or Bluetooth.
KDE is awesome. KDE Connect is awesome too. It does a lot of useful stuff (remote media control, remote trackpad, remote keyboard, etc). But the most awesome things are the little stuff: the ability to answer any notification from your phone directly from your computer's notification, the ability to just send a webpage to your computer and have it open the web page you started to read on your mobile phone. This kind of stuff quickly becomes a natural part of your workflow, KDE Connect doesn't even get in your way, it's completely transparent.
Holy sh*t I just clicked on a phone number `tel:` link in my browser on my laptop and the phone number was instantly typed into my phone, one-press away to be called. I wasn't expecting that!
KDE Connect is a power user's dream. If you're currently on a Mac wondering how people go without Handoff, synced media controls and desktop messaging, we don't; many of us use KDE connect. In all honesty, there's too many features in this app to list, and I recommend anyone with a spare computer and an Android phone to check it out. It's a legitimate gamechanger for productivity!
I use a Macbook but don't use any of the Apple software and my phone is Android so I would love to have KDE Connect. I tried it a couple of weeks ago but couldn't get it to work. Will try again now!
Edit: Build failed
Action: compile for libs/dbus:1.13.18-3 FAILED
*** Craft all failed: libs/dbus after 32 seconds ***
fatal error: package libs/dbus all failed
Boy. I got on full on KDE plasma since 5.12 I think. KDE connect was promptly installed and I never was able to use a USB cable for data transfer but with KDE connect, I can simply send a file.
Its been magical. At least with plasma, the system integration is full and the clipboard feature is a godsend.
More power to KDE guys
Yes, the KDE MTP implementation was recently reworked, but it's still randomly unusable with most android phones in my experience, complaining that it can't access to the device, etc.
I'll take this opportunity to ask a technical question: clipboard integration via KDE Connect was a godsend, but it stopped working with Android 10.
I think I read somewhere that Android 10 forbids apps from managing the clipboard. Can anyone confirm this? I hold out hope that clipboard integration might work again...
They have come up with a workaround for this. Instead of actively monitoring your clipboard in the background, there now exists a "Send Clipboard" button/intent that shares the current clipboard value with the other device(s). Works well enough for me on Android 11.
BTW, for those trapped in Windows land, there's an experimental port of the KDE Connect app for Windows that works surprisingly well. My wife was quite puzzled, recently, when a phone call cause video playback on our media PC to pause automatically...
While this is true, "My Phone" doesn't do a great job of staying consistently connected, and it even fails to do a lot of the features that Connect can offer. I still prefer Connect on Windows.
I however have no issues staying connected with "My Phone" and when I used it occasionally there were issues with "KDE Connect".
Also the feature I use most is pushing a website to my laptop so I can continue there later. With "My Phone" this works whether I am at home or out and about. Also it works when my laptop is currently not online. "KDE Connect" requires a VPN connection when I am not on the same network and the feature to push to another device doesn't work if that device is offline at the time. I understand that the difference is that one uses a server and one doesn't, and for some people not having Microsoft in the middle is an advantage but for others it is not.
Answering the call, placing a call, or just having an incoming call ring? I’m maybe in favor of the first, slightly opposed to the second, and would find the last so infuriating that I’d shut it off immediately.
KDE 4.0 was a necessary stepping stone to get where KDE/Plasma is today.
It would for sure have been nice to have a more feature-complete 4.0 release, but I don't see what the dev team could realistically have done better. There were only that many developers, so the only way would have been to further delay the 4.0 release, thus rendering KDE obsolete in a different way by not shipping anything for even longer.
Source: I was with the KDE dev team from about 2008-2012.
I completely understand the developer point of view. Just talking about the UX.
I think the KDE team is very productive and have influenced the desktop experience greatly. Much of that influence is not well understood but can be seen in all the descendants of Konqueror (almost every modern browser now).
The way docked windows work in KDevelop 3 was pretty nice. Then I saw it on other IDEs. I am not sure which came first.
I've been using KDE connect since it was first released. It's improved massively over the years and is a solid tool for managing android phones from the desktop. It's one of the first things I install on every new device.
Trying to copy an audiobook from my linux laptop to my android phone at the moment. I don't think I've ever been able to successfully pull this off before (possibly because last time I tried I was trying to copy files directly onto an SD card in my phone); but I've successfully done it now. Finally KDE Connect has become useful to me!
Its fantastic. I basically never connect phone via USB now (except for ADB operations). And the speed is very good, unlike the crappy Bluetooth or fiddly FTP. KDEConnect just works
I wonder if this wouldn't work nicely when combined with UnifiedPush, so that one device (KDE Connect isn't restricted to PC<->Phone) could still communicate with another when not on the same network.
I can imagine myself leveraging this on a smartwatch I recently bought to install postmarketOS on.
I just discovered that they made this for Windows finally. I had been using this for a decade now, and the addition to android was an amazing quality of life improvement for me. Now that it can work on Windows it's even more powerful and useful.
Apart from the usual bells and whistles of KDE Connect, I have my devices connected to each other over awireguard tunnel. This way KDE Connect works even if the devices aren't on the same network. It was the best thing I did for myself!
KDE Connect just works, and gives that seamless integration between phone and computer. Pausing video automatically when a call comes in, easy file transfers, use your phone as a touchpad mouse, it's so slick.
Wow, I recently rage-switched to lxde after yet another kde upgrade on a rolling-release os (FreeBSD) that left kde unusable. This is making me consider coming back to kde.
I also had issues with the kde5 packages when moving to FreeBSD 13. But reinstalling the packages fixed everything with all my settings intact. Was a 5 minute job. Works great now.
I guess having an OS worth very few maintainers compared to Linux, Windows or Mac leads to this kind of thing. But I still love it. Also, all the kde maintainers are active in #kde-freebsd on freenode so you can get quick and super knowledgeable help there. Advantage of small teams is that there's no 'just raise a ticket and we may look at it some day' mentality.
When I moved to it I had two minor issues. For one they gave me a small config change that fixed it. The other was a bug in a FreeBSD specific script and was fixed and moved to the live repo in 3 days. This was the kind of thing that would normally linger in an issue ticket for months or years. I was really impressed with how much they cared about these things. Thanks guys!
When watching a movie on the laptop, it's so handy to use the remote control to pause/play/change sound or move the timeline.
Now some stuff don't work so well: file transfer is flaky sometimes, sending a text from the laptop has a very primitive UI and I never seem to be able to share the clipboard when I want to.
But I love to ping my phone when it's lost in the house.
> I never seem to be able to share the clipboard when I want to.
It usually works for me, but the problem I have is that sometimes the devices lose sync with each other if they've been off for any length of time. Opening the KDE Connect settings typically fixes this, but it's not ideal!
I absolutely love KDE Connect, though. Being able to copy text from a laptop to a desktop or use my phone to pause music if I happen to leave for a walk and forgot to stop it is great! I haven't used it yet, but they also have presentation controls for your phone including a pointer that uses the phone's instrumentation to move an animated circle across the screen. Love it!
> the problem I have is that sometimes the devices lose sync with each other if they've been off for any length of time. Opening the KDE Connect settings typically fixes this, but it's not ideal!
A slightly better solution I have found helpful is to pull down Yakuake (or krunner) and run `kdeconnect-cli --refresh`. Beats having to open a QT window, only to be closed off immediately.
It is great but it increments ports each time it connects/reconnects which means you will have quite a few unwanted entries in your known_hosts file. Minor problem, but if you like to keep it organized you should check it from time to time and delete all the obsolete connections.
You don't even need a computer. I use the Android app to send files to another phone or tablet with the computer switched off. I can control media playing on a tablet from my phone, ring a device to find it, share browser tabs.
On my Ubuntu I'm using gsconnect which implements the same protocol.
I spent a few minutes on the site trying to see what was supported and saw nothing. I have a passing awareness of KDE so I could assume that the desktop platform was Linux, but the mobile platform was not specified anywhere in my initial searching. I have to admit I didn't dedicate a lot of time to that though, since I have no interest in running desktop Linux.
Which actually makes the information lack even worse since there was no indication of what desktops and phones were supported in my cursory examination. It always amazes me how often basic information like this is absent from the promotional material for various products.
Could someone tell me whether it's battery intensive for the mobile phone or the laptop? I have been hesitant to install it lest it use too much battery of my phone for just an occasional use.
When I'm listening to music the constantly changing song drains my phone's battery over the course of the day. (phone in my pocket either way). For every other use I don't notice it, and it is handy to be able to check on what my kids are doing on the computer when I'm away.
Im using it the whole day and it reports less than 0.1% battery usage (from 3000mAh) and 104 Bytes of data usage. Its probably using more than that but its definitely not something to worry about.
works very well. I had it on a Samsung Galaxy S7 and sending messages was wonky due to a known issue with that and a few other Samsung Galaxy phones. However it was easy to setup, use, and absolutely love it, well done!
KDE continues to impress.
As a side note, I just found out Kmail supports oauth2 with o365!
I see nothing on the site, nor in the docs, not even in the how-it-works about security. Is this not a huge security risk in the making? Controlling your phones and your desktops seems risky.
All communication is encrypted, accounts are added by verifying each other's fingerprints. File sharing seems SFTP based.
You can disable any plugins you find too risky. I haven't found any problem so far. All the servers and clients are open source so you can check the source and roll your own if you really want to.
Just earlier today I had my phone playing music connected to a bluetooth speaker. I was just getting to my computer and out of habit, hit the volume down media keys. I was surprised for a second when it worked, because immediately after hitting the key I remembered the speakers were connected to my phone, not the computer. Then I realized it was KDE Connect just working :)