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.
That said, for my specific use case, Blip is a FAR superior option, and much lighter weight.
The only two issue that I found, it's that not works on the wifi network of my work office. Something there must be blocking it. And that sometimes gets confused when you have multiple videos open on the browser and shows the wrong video on the multimedia controls.
The broken WiFi probably has something to prevent broadcast from working. It's not uncommon for some enterprise setups as a trickle of broadcast traffic can really mess with WiFi efficiency. You can work around it by manually specifying the IP addresses of the devices you wish to connect if those are static-ish.
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)
The Android app let me add a peer by IP address. Once I opened traffic on the right port, it crossed a network boundary just fine.
My case was an adjacent network, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work across more hops.
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.
ZFS via ZoL etc.
As a daily driver i use PopOs! which is very nice since the've packaged nvidiadrivers etc. and I mainly use it to play games.
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.
I'm seriously interested, since I read it's a killer feature but I cannot really imagine how it would help me.
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 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.
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.
Not to be confused with Qt Everywhere
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.
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)
Thanks for sharing
* 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
Status: RESOLVED
> This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. The bug is now closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME due to lack of needed information.
This trend of auto-closing issues is so upsetting. Can we get rid of it already? This describes an actual issue, and it wouldn't get magically resolved through a lack of actions. I could maybe buy auto-closing bugs that have been stale for 3 years, but 30 days is just ridiculously short. It only serves as makeup for the numbers to appear as if there are not many defects in the software, and it seems to be a common practice in too many projects.
---- EDIT: Turns out this got fixed in the end [1]. Good for this particular case, but the point stands.
[1]: https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/merge_reques...
https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/merge_reques...
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.
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.
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 would try fixed IPs to see if this solves the issue for you.
To the point that I'd say that Wi-Fi drivers are the most offender in printer discovery problems, which also rely on mDNS.
Another issue that many mDNS applications, including KDE Connect, don't account on multi-interface setups and send respond to mDNS request using incorrect network interface: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507972 / https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507954
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
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.
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.
I've rarely had any connection issues with Google Pixel (7 currently) and Debian with Plasma 5 or 6 on x86 / 64 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.
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 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 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
Perhaps my usage is basic in this way - I've never had an issue with using the iOS app as it is.
I remember this too. It happened to me about 90 seconds ago.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Hands down one of my favourite Desktop apps for Linux, kudos to the developers.
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.
Best of luck =3
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 cost me four hours (QField atrocious error messages) and I'm still angry about it.
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.