> To achieve this, KDE Connect:
implements a secure communication protocol over the network, and allows any developer to create plugins on top of it.
Has a component that you install on your desktop.
Has a KDE Connect client app you run on your phone.
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
so, the rfc have a section on how the mdns server have to evolve to handle multiple interfaces and own that. but in reality nobody gives a damn because the maintainer (redhat ibm) is it in the context it was invented (work networks on the 00s), so everyone (like many comments below) just work around in all the wrong ways making other things more complicated.
"just do these hundreds changed on wireguard, your firewall, install this reverse proxy... now your service that only exists to route things automatically can look like it works" heh.
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.
This is only if you use Windows (or MacOS, as there's also a KDE Connect compatible Mac app out there somewhere IIRC). If you're on KDE Desktop Linux, you're already good-to-go, as it's a pre-installed component of a typical KDE environment. :)
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.
This was early this year, maybe it's gotten better since?
KDE Connect is really for mobile (Android) devices and a computer, not computer to computer, IME
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:
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
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.
Not to be confused with Qt Everywhere
I'm seriously interested, since I read it's a killer feature but I cannot really imagine how it would help me.
Also (more so at home) large transfers are pretty fast, regularly send movies from and to my phone, at pretty much connection speed.
You can also mount your phone storage over the network, control your mouse with your phone and much more.
I can also stop, resume, control volume of media playing on another device.
I can share the clipboard, send files, use a remote keyboard (I think I disabled it) and ping a device.
It can do a lot more but I'm not using much else, I think.
I can share clipboard contentents, can send files, send web page urls from phone to desktop to open a browser there, can control media playback between devices (switch to next track/pause desktop from phone and vice versa) etc also I get phone notifications on desktop
(All optional)
I would try fixed IPs to see if this solves the issue for you.
In the last year I have even given up on KDE in favor of Cinnamon on Mint.I loved KDE but there would always be some issue coming up. LTS Mint with Cinnamon has been rock solid.
Suffice it to say: at the time I bought this iPhone 12 mini, there weren't really good options when prioritizing {small form factor,good privacy posture,good security posture,software freedom}.
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.
But it doesn't really matter, because KDE Connect implements its own sort-of mDNS system by itself, in the form of JSON broadcast across the local network on a standard port offering hostnames, services, and other metadata. Actual, real mDNS would require integration into the host's networking setup and that's too much to ask for clients like Android or iOS and you'd need to implement it manually in many other cases, so they kind of made their own mDNS. It also means you don't need root access to run KDE Connect on your device, which makes it viable on platforms like the Steam Deck.
To get KDE Connect working reliably, you need to make multicast traffic work reliably. Every network has its own restrictions when it comes to multicast so it's hard to know what specific tweaks your workstation needs. Having KDE Connect open on your phone, you should see packets coming in on your desktop on 255.255.255.255 on 1716/udp.
2. Thanks for that info; next time it fails to connect I'll take a look in wireshark.
The computer doesn't even change addresses, there is no need for mDNS or anything fancy, setting up devices manually once would be just fine.
It's handy, but needs work.
If I was working on KDE Connect I would add a microphone and speaker based pairing system using OFDM modulation lifted from Rattlegram. Each device would share all IP addresses associated with themselves using sound to broadcast the information.
I've rarely had any connection issues with Google Pixel (7 currently) and Debian with Plasma 5 or 6 on x86 / 64 platforms.
Linux, Android, iOS, macOS all worked in harmony. Now not even two Android phones using the same software version can see each other, file transfers keep failing after a brief while. And all with the same devices that worked before, across various networks.
Not to say anything about connectivity between Linux and Android or iOS.
Often desktop client just cannot connect to mobile. At first I noticed that this happens when desktop client starts to output in logs these (reported [1]):
kdeconnect.core: Too many remembered identities, ignoring "<id of KDE Connect on my android device>" received via UDP
#!/bin/dash -x
while sleep 1m; do
nmcli connection show --active | grep wifi || continue
kdeconnect-cli -l | grep reachable && continue
# notify-send 'No reachable devices via kdeconnect. Restarting'
systemctl --no-pager --user status app-org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon@autostart.service
systemctl --no-pager --user stop app-org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon@autostart.service
killall kdeconnectd
systemctl --no-pager --user start app-org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon@autostart.service
done
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
I remember this too. It happened to me about 90 seconds ago.
Perhaps my usage is basic in this way - I've never had an issue with using the iOS app as it is.
- Receive your phone notifications on your desktop computer
- Reply to text messages (or even read?)
I see reports that it doesn't work. These are mostly for distros where Plasma is either rather old or taking a backseat after other environment (usually Gnome). I'm having great results with the latest Plasma 6 on Slackware-current and also in a standard Windows 11 environment.
Currently leaning towards Debian Testing, but that might depend on my testing of Slackware now. I use Arch daily in WSL, but I've have had enough breakages that I don't want it as my primary OS.
I would make the /boot partition twice the size the installer suggests though as on my laptop I can't upgrade the kernel because the /boot runs out of space. The laptop is used to view old manuals in PDFs while working on my car so I don't really care.
TBH any of the major Linux distros that have been around for a while are fine. I don't like Fedora or Ubuntu because they are a bit corporate.
I personally wouldn't bother with any of the derivative distros. Typically there isn't a lot different other than they've pre-configured some packages. IME that causes more headaches long term.
I use the OS as a base system and most of the stuff that needs to be newer versions can be done by installing the binary to to ~/bin as it is added to your path by ~/.profile if the directory exists on Debian.
Stuff like Discord, Slack, Kdenlive, OBS etc. I install using flatpak.
Other stuff. Go, Vim (I compile vim from source) and nvim can stuff can be compiled or dropped into /usr/local
That covers most stuff IME. However I appreciate this won't work for everyone.
To me, coming from Unix, it's mostly sane.
Look at Fedora (if you like RPM distros) if you’re after something pretty nicely put together that stays reasonably well up to date. Very well maintained. Influenced by Red Hat (or “led by” or even “owned by”), which works for some, not for others.
CachyOS is trendy these days. EndeavourOS is basically Arch with an installer.
There are a few distros targeted at Windows refugees. ZorinOS is well regarded. AnduinOS is a newer entry. But if you’re willing to walk away from a Windows-like UI, skip these.
For people that want a Windows like UI, I would probably suggest Cinnamon. It works pretty much like Windows 7/10 without all the visual nonsense that KDE typically has.
I am not being hyperbolic when I say that I can see a pixel out of place on a webpage on the other side of the room.
https://kde.org/content/home/main.jpg
This is a screenshot from their site. Just in this screenshot I see the following:
1) there is an horrendous text shadow effect on the text under the "Home" desktop icon in the top left.
2) Clock text is too large compared to the rest of the interface, especially the icons next to it.
3) Trash Icon looks like out of place compared to the other icons.
4) Drop shadow effect on the window and the start menu thing. It kinda too dark really.
5) Every single gap between interface elements seems different and off. The icon sizes seem a bit all over the place.
6) There is a gradient on the window title bar and rounded corners. Cinnamon does this as well. I dunno it is very Window XP Luna (which I never liked).
7) The window control icons look off to me and don't fit in with the rest of the interface IMO.
A lot of this I appreciate can be probably be changed. But that is how it comes OOTB if it is an official screenshot. It feels like a Windows Vista ripoff.
Generally I find KDE lacks "taste". None of the Linux GUIs are that great tbh. People put up fancy screenshots, but I guarantee the moment the windows are arranged in any other way it looks not so great.
GNOME has the opposite problem imo. I feel like it has "taste", but it feels like a system fully designed by designers, with no engineers giving practical pushback. It's the same issue macOS has, but amplified: Designers have some grand idea about their vision being the one true way of using the system and made it hard to impossible to customize.
I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.
I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.
TBF, I was linked their more up to date screenshots in a sibling thread and it does look more consistent but it still seems off.
> I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.
I don't like any of the Linux DEs tbh. They all have issues.
I might give KDE a go. But I think Debian does a poor job at packaging it and I don't really want to change distros.
> I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.
I tried compiling Cosmic on source on Debian 12. I ran out of memory on the VM I was doing it on. I also found out that on Debian 12 their rustc was broken!
I ended up installing Dash To Dock and Ubuntu App Indicator Icons when I was using it and I ended up with something decent. I also usually have to faff around in the gnome tweaks tool to get the old "legacy" apps and the new apps looking consistent.
Btw as one the web developer behind KDE's website, do you mind telling me where you found that screenshot?
Those do look better admittedly. I still think it looks a bit "Fischer Price" but that is personal taste.
> Btw as one the web developer behind KDE's website, do you mind telling me where you found that screenshot?
Of course. It was on your screenshots page that I found via DDG
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=KDE+screenshots
The first result I go was:
Stock Konsole on the left, stock Ghostty on the right. Note that both terminals have multiple tabs open. The amount of wasted space and visual noise in Konsole is baffling. Not to mention Ghostty is able to display 4 more lines of actual console output (you know, the whole point of a console).
In my experience, many KDE apps follow the same UX. Great for configuration and being able to use primarily the mouse, bad if you are more interested in a keyboard centric flow with a focus on the content.
KDE actually was built around the Windows paradigm; Gnome is a Mac clone. Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome maintained as a side project from a distro with a bad security and management track record. Really the only thing it adds is a launcher; KDE optionally provides the same style if the user wants it.
Go find a thread where your pet software is on topic. This thread is about KDE Connect. Does Cinnamon support that? Does Cinnamon offer anything like it?
In this particular part of thread, people were talking about Windows UI replacements. Like it or not conversations do diverge from the original intended purpose.
Secondly, Cinnamon isn't my "pet software". Cinnamon IMO is more similar to the Windows 7/10/11 UI than KDE and has none of the fluff that KDE normally has in it. I actually don't really like any of the Linux UIs. I think they all suffer from significant issues.
> KDE actually was built around the Windows paradigm; Gnome is a Mac clone. Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome maintained as a side project from a distro with a bad security and management track record. Really the only thing it adds is a launcher; KDE optionally provides the same style if the user wants it.
It seems that you really don't like cinnamon and thus why you are being so aggressive. I don't really appreciate the unwarranted hostility.
I don't personally use Linux Mint (I use Debian). I don't like derivative distros for the reason that you highlighted. However Cinnamon seems works reasonably well and tends to be quite a bit lighter than KDE IME.
> This thread is about KDE Connect. Does Cinnamon support that? Does Cinnamon offer anything like it?
You are aware that you can use KDE software in other Desktop Environments? It took me a few seconds to do a web search and it seems that you can use KDE connect and Cinnamon at the same time.
KDE Connect can be used with Cinnamon via GSConnect.
Maybe they need self-hostable coordination server so that devices can connect to each other through it.
For now it's still 'send to telegram saved messages' for me.
What a long way to spell VPN :-) (been using it for a decade or so through wireguard)
Not sure if it's the best solution, but there's no reason to take over your entire network.
Even with my old OpenVPN setup I had a config where only my local 10.2.0.0/16 got routed over the VPN, everything else went straight to the outside world. Set up IPv6 ULA and you don't need to worry about IP addressing conflicts.
Sometimes on windows it needs a click of the refresh button to get going after connecting to a network. The discovery is wonky on some platforms.
(the DE has been called Plasma for ages, and almost everything KDE works outside of it)
You had apps like Konqueror (web browser, file manager), KMail (email client), Kompose (music score editor), KImages (later rebranded to Krita), and KDevelop (software dev IDE).
Modern KDE apps dropped the 'K' prefix and moved to a more recognizable scheme, like: Falkon (web browser), Dolphin (file manager), and Okular (document viewer).
As you can see, its now a mix of whether the app keeps the 'K' in the name. Some do not.
Wow, what a coincident that parent just happened to suggest the identical naming convention. What are the chances?
I disagree.
Thanks for sharing
Seems like it even does the universal clipboard as well, I use that all the time with Apple devices, really cool to see an OSS alternative.
You can also exit an Android process, of course. It's probably what you're looking for, but it's weirdly inconsistent with the overall user experience and you should try to make something consistent instead. Even closing a top-level activity is weird.
Gets a little funky talking to my iPhone but I’m surprised how easily things like the remote control work right out the box
I can't specifically speak to systemd, but it'd surprise me if there was a dependency there; it's not running that deep in the system. Also there's a guix package and they don't use systemd, so that's another mark in favor.
Best of luck =3
For file transfer I used LocalSend, but it was still annoying.
But the UX could be better. When I send a file, no notification is shown on my phone. But when I look in my Downloads/ folder, the file is there, so that's good.
Now, when I open the kdeconnect-app on Linux, it cannot connect to my phone. Even if the app is open on my phone. I see the phone, but it says "disconnected".
So, as it stands, I put this in the "barely works, needs more love from developers" category.
E.g. that it works over the local network or bluetooth only, no remote connectivity without a VPN which the marketing page with fancy graphics (https://kdeconnect.kde.org/) doesn't even tell you because it's so dumbed down to the point of being useless.
Also, why the fuck does KDE have two separate wikis.
I have a desktop + laptop + phone.
When I want to sync a directory with a lot of files I wrote a little shell script that uses rsync to do it. This does require running SSH on my laptop but I can invoke the shell script from my desktop.
Likewise with my phone I want to backup my camera photos, using rsync is nice here to avoid sending thousands of them over every time. I run SSH on my phone with Termux, it was really painless to set up and is only on when I run it. Likewise, I invoke the shell script from my desktop to do the transfer.
What you're looking for is something more like SyncThing: https://syncthing.net
For example:
- On desktop, wrote a blog post
- On desktop, pushed my blog post folder to my laptop
- On laptop, publish the blog post 3 days later
- On laptop, fix a typo and publish the post
- On desktop, pull in the changes from the laptop
With SyncThing, would this overwrite files on the wrong device as soon as I "sync"?
But I think it has some major usability issues. The two things I struggle with the most:
1. Sometimes (not always, but often!) the phone is not connected to the computer at all. In order to send something from the computer to the phone, I have to unlock the phone, find KDE connect in the apps, run it, and connect to the computer. I understand that this could very well be just The Way of Android, but it's still obnoxious.
2. The text/SMS sub-app in KDE connect is terrible. It doesn't sync text messages in the background, so it tries to sync when you start it. But it's very slow and takes a good 5-10 minutes for all of your text messages to sync. And apparently it does contacts last because in the beginning you only see phone numbers. And it doesn't show pictures. And (this is normally not a complaint I make), it is very ugly. GS Connect looks way better, but I have no idea if it _works_ any better.
Modern devices have just "grown", your phone with its 2FA app is also a source of identity, yet the boundaries between a tool to be used, a computer to "work on" (even an SMS to your boss counts as work for me!), and a "fundamental part of your life" - whether by you or by a megacorp (see: notifications! Mindless scrolling on the social media of your choice!) - are all blurred.
* fast as possible
* LAN, but also WAN when necessary
* in fact how about multi-protocol, and use the fastest protocol that's available on both devices, it's 2025 people!
* work for sending a gargantuan amount of files with possible interruptions (essentially, be rsync)
* be battery efficient, it's 2025 people!
* don't rely on a centralized cloud server, just connect the damned devices to each other
If you think you can hack this together, you should write it for Gnu Hurd because they'll release that well before you're finished
It took a long time for me to prove that what KDE does negatively impact the battery life.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441830
The other user even wrote a LD_PRELOAD hijacking library to not recompile the application every time
https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/merge_reques...
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