I was watching a youtube video on my computer and my phone rang. The video automatically paused whilst I had my call, then when I hung up, the video continued.

Totally seamless. The kind of thing Apple would show off as part of their "continuity" between macos and iOS.

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.

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.

* 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

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.

> 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.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423497

But can someone state conclusively if Bluetooth-base connectivty in KDE Connect actually works in 2025? I looked into this a few weeks ago and it seemed liked from mailing list posts until Bluetooth functionality in KDE Connect equals WiFi connectivity the feature is not enabled?

When traveling it's much easier to do "point to point" between laptop and phone and in theory Bluetooth can support this easier than WiFi via third-party access-point or having to mess with WiFi direct.

https://localsend.org/

Gets a little funky talking to my iPhone but I’m surprised how easily things like the remote control work right out the box

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.

For file transfer I used LocalSend, but it was still annoying.

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.

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.

Hands down one of my favourite Desktop apps for Linux, kudos to the developers.

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.

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.

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'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

It cost me four hours (QField atrocious error messages) and I'm still angry about it.