KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

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

I have a all my messengers running on my desktop as well, so I don't really have those problems. How's KDE Connect superior?

I'm seriously interested, since I read it's a killer feature but I cannot really imagine how it would help me.

Even just copying your clipboard is very useful.

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.

Those of us who live in the US where SMS is the default messenger can't have all of their messengers running on their desktop.

I've always run GNOME and KDE Connect port called gsconnect [1] works very well. I run it on several Ubuntus and on Debian 11. I run the KDE Connect app on my Android devices. That plus syncthing are exceptionally good tools to link all my devices together.

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

I can share links to myself with a messenger but it's much faster to share them to a given device and see its browser open a tab to that link. It works inside apps too: I can share a video from phone to tablet (NewPipe, probably YouTube too, it's the Android builtin sharing system.)

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.

It is less about messengers per se, itnis about interacting between devices.

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)

Sure you can. Just use KDE Connect.

Silly use case but I watch TV on my laptop in bed and the cat likes to watch with me. I use some ancient X11 app to freeze the keyboard and mouse and then control vlc, etc. from KDE-connect. That way when my cat attacks Jedis he doesn't reboot my laptop.

I've been using KDE Connect without KDE for a while now. Works for me (tm)

How did you do that? I'm on XFCE and would love to use it, too.

I'm on Sway and Debian. Debian has a separate package for KDE Connect: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/kdeconnect

I've found that installing the kdeconnect package on the desktop and the app on the phone was all that was needed.

You just install it. It works everywhere.