Valent Is a KDE Connect Client for GTK-Based Desktops(linuxuprising.com)

202 pointsby logix3 tahun yang lalu87 comments

Valent Is a KDE Connect Client for GTK-Based Desktops

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2023/02/valent-is-kde-connect-client-for-gtk.html

87 comments

vanderZwan3 tahun yang lalu

KDE Connect is the one "linux" tool where after showing to my partner what it can do she asked me if I could install on her Windows laptop, her tablet, and her phone. It's been extremely practical when exchanging PDFs of (say) traintickets, remote controlling the volume of whichever laptop we connected to the projector for movie night (which was the "tech demo" that convinced her), and so on.

shaan73 tahun yang lalu

Indeed, kudos to the devs for maintaining a Windows version too!

saghm3 tahun yang lalu

I checked recently to see if there was a version of it for MacOS for my work laptop, and they apparently do have one in development, but right now it's only available through nightly builds. The commitment to cross platform support for this really is impressive!

TuringTest3 tahun yang lalu

But does it work on Windows?

I've only been able to connect it right after a fresh install, but after I reboot it doesn't see the phone anymore.

Is your experience better?

poulpy1233 tahun yang lalu

I don't use it often but it works between my android phone and my windows machine

IshKebab3 tahun yang lalu

They should probably rename it.

pxc3 tahun yang lalu

I kinda like that the name draws attention to KDE. And it is still KDE software, whether you're using Plasma as your desktop environment or not.

chungy3 tahun yang lalu

I disagree. It attracts interest in the KDE project as a whole.

whalesalad3 tahun yang lalu

konnect

sneak3 tahun yang lalu

the k-prefix is a nerd shibboleth that does not help those not in on the joke/tradition/convention.

sangnoir3 tahun yang lalu

Apple didn't get the memo with their nerdy prefix.

spookie3 tahun yang lalu

It's a KDE project, I see no issue

iudqnolq3 tahun yang lalu

If it wasn't buggy over tailscale it'd be perfect.

I was travelling for a month and decided to put my sim card in a cheap android phone and connect to it remotely to keep getting SMS 2FA rather than getting roaming. After about two weeks KDE connect over tailscale said the phone didn't exist, so I was glad I'd set up google's remote sms as a backup. (I verified through tailscale it was still connected).

vanderZwan3 tahun yang lalu

Could another possible reason perhaps be some kind of battery savings setting on the android phone at home? Since you technically didn't open it directly for two weeks.

Centigonal3 tahun yang lalu

From the article:

What can this do? Using Valent (and KDE Connect), you can:

- receive Android phone notifications on your desktop and reply to messages

- sync the clipboard between your Android device and desktop

- control music playing on your desktop from your Android phone

- share files between your desktop and Android device, and browse your phone from the desktop

- send SMS from your desktop

- execute predefined commands from your Android phone to run on your desktop

- control your desktop's mouse and keyboard from the Android device

- browse your Android device filesystem from your desktop wirelessly

- and more

skykooler3 tahun yang lalu

There’s also an iOS client, though it doesn’t have all features implemented due to limitations in Apple’s APIs. However it’s still the most convenient way to transfer files between an iPhone and a Windows or Linux computer.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

Signal "note to self" is another way.

jeroenhd3 tahun yang lalu

It'll work but that will upload your files to the cloud. If you're on cable internet or even DSL, transferring video files that way will take significantly longer than just using the local connection KDE Connect provides.

Of course, there are many local alternatives as well. I just can't see cloud upload features as an alternative to a local network transfer mechanism.

sneak3 tahun yang lalu

This ruins your images or videos via terrible recompression that you can't disable.

iudqnolq3 tahun yang lalu

If it's not private file.io gives you a handy qr code and supports <2gb

rickstanley3 tahun yang lalu

Telegram's "Saved messages" is another.

rouxz3 tahun yang lalu

Only if you trust telegram (you shouldn't)

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

Without context this is just noise.

Also when you say: don't trust Telegram, while not saying anything about WhatsApp, you are, on average, pushing people from a solution that isn't proven to be trustworthy to a solution that is proven to be untrustworthy.

Because unless you simultaneously point out that WhatsApp is worse, that is where people will go if they listen to you and avoid Telegram.

heinrich59913 tahun yang lalu

I think in this context, WhatsApp is better than Telegram. In Telegram, you'd upload your files in a way that the server can see them. In WhatsApp, the server won't be able to see the contents.

(Even in general, I think that Telegram is no clear win over WhatsApp, and in fact I'd consider it worse in terms of chat message security.)

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

WhatsApp has a documented history of all kinds of shadyness from uploading unencrypted (yes, unencrypted) backups to Google under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".

I really can't understand why you bright folks here on HN falls for WhatsApps marketing.

E2E means absolutely nothing as long as the messages are siphoned away in broad daylight.

That said: avoid Telegram all you want. But if you mean no one should ever touch it, I hope you are also against physical mail which is way less secure and also email which is way less secure than Telegram.

heinrich59913 tahun yang lalu

> WhatsApp has a documented history of all kinds of shadyness from uploading unencrypted (yes, unencrypted) backups to Google under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".

I don't have that backup enabled. Does that mean that WhatsApp is secure for me with everyone who also has that disabled?

I don't see how Telegram is better in that respect; the server sees all messages directly. It doesn't even need a documented backdoor like you described.

> under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".

*EDIT*: Can you give a link to that agreement? It'd interest me. :)

> But if you mean no one should ever touch it

That's not what I said.

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

> I don't have that backup enabled. Does that mean that WhatsApp is secure for me with everyone who also has that disabled?

As long as no one of them enables it, probably.

I don't know if this agreement is in place any longer, but you should be able to find references to it using a search engine.

heinrich59913 tahun yang lalu

> I don't know if this agreement is in place any longer, but you should be able to find references to it using a search engine.

I've not found it quickly. I found this article which doesn't mention it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/where-whatsapp-went-wr.... Since you made the claim, I'd usually ask you to substantiate it.

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

Hi again. Yes, I agree you should ask me, it wasn't as easy to find as I first thought, but here[1] is a thread on HN that discusses it and a bit down the thread you find a link to the Verge [2] which in turn links to the case papers [3].

I admit the links I found now are less clear than I though and I don't have more time now, but there is clearly reason to be suspicious when 1.) Facebook stops encrypting data before upload 2.) Google accept to keep the data without counting it against the users quota 3.) sources claim there was a deal. None of these three carries too much weight on their own but together they paint a picture that something is going on.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28485312

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/17/22180258/google-whatsapp...

[3]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20428869-the_state_o...

sneak3 tahun yang lalu

Telegram is not e2ee.

pmontra3 tahun yang lalu

Telegram has a Secret Chat. It's on the 3 dots menu in the screen for a contact. Secret chats are available only on one device, they don't sync to the other devices of the user.

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

And? WhatsApp is e2ee-but-sends-your-data-brazenly-to-google-and-facebook-by-sidechannels.

So far Telegram hasn't been caught once the last decade while WhatsApp has been caught at least twicem

JustSomeNobody3 tahun yang lalu

iOS app does also support Samba.

I really with the Photos app did. I don't think a "Pro" phone is a Pro phone without that feature.

jonas-w3 tahun yang lalu

Perfect! Works great for an alpha release.

Few years ago i had kde and used kde connect, but i didn't want that much qt in my life (can't stand it), and switched to gnome. There was gsconnect but it wasn't that realiable. Used that for a while but in the end i switched to sway, becaus twms are great and everything is so much snappier. But one thing was missing, kdeconnect. I didn't want qt, and gsconnect was a gnome extension. I tried several other alternatives to, but nothing was as good.

jwrallie3 tahun yang lalu

What's wrong with surrounding yourself with qt?

jonas-w3 tahun yang lalu

It's just an opinion, it's subjective:

For example the only qt application i use is wireshark, it looks to me like windows 7, hijacks my input several times when i want to type somewhere else, hovering over menu items at the top is always off for me,...

And GTK seems to work better for me with tiling window managers, as popups are by default not windows (idk what they are), this way if I click on something and a popup or dialog comes up, it stays as a popup or dialog and doesn't take up half of my screen and splits my screen.

GTK isn't perfect, but at least it looks good and is more pleasent to use for me.

0x6c6f6c3 tahun yang lalu

I believe the term is "floating windows" when they're above the tiling windows.

jonas-w3 tahun yang lalu

Floating windows would be something i need to specifically whitelist in my twm config, thats how i could achieve it with qt, but the gtk popups aren't treated like normal windows from the beginning

seszett3 tahun yang lalu

I've used kdeconnect under various different systems without ever using KDE (well, not since the Konqueror days so it's been a while). It works just fine under awesome, dwm and whatever two of my coworkers are using (some kind of Gnome desktop as far as I know).

reocha3 tahun yang lalu

The gsconnect extension for gnome also works well if you are on a gnome desktop https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

tssva3 tahun yang lalu

This is from the same author.

jonas-w3 tahun yang lalu

Valent is from Andy Holmes.

GSConnect is from Daniel Landau.

tssva3 tahun yang lalu

Andy Holmes is the original author of gsconnect.

coolgoose3 tahun yang lalu

Wasted the opportunity to call it Konnect :p

JasonFruit3 tahun yang lalu

Given the state of Linux application naming, we're lucky it's not called GKCellP, so we'd have to find it via 'apt search kdeconnect' every time because we can't remember the name. (I'm looking at you, GKrellM. You too, Liferea. )

Smar3 tahun yang lalu

Konnect is KDEPIM's app bundler ui, that allows using kmail, korganizer and such inside single window.

mixmastamyk3 tahun yang lalu

How about Gonnect?

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

I could understand Gnome as an ideological hack back when KDE wasn't completely open source or when Ubuntu pushed beautiful and polished versions of Gnome 2. And when KDE was on version 4.

Today, why would anyone choose anything except KDE?

chungy3 tahun yang lalu

GNOME, KDE, MATE, LXQt, Xfce, etc each have their own design philosophies, benefits, and detriments. None of them are all-around objectively better than the others.

GNOME does at least get a lot of corporate development and backing to make it integrate into Active Desktop, centrally-managed settings (aka group policy), and accessibility functions. These aspects are rather large reasons that big enterprise distributions default to GNOME over all other choices.

Most users care about none of those features. Some people just like GNOME. Some people like KDE. It's simply a choice.

franga20003 tahun yang lalu

KDE is much more glitchy compared to GNOME and many other DEs in my experience (but it also has way more features, so that kind of makes sense). Many users don't care about most of those features, so taking the more stable option makes sense.

There also still are big issues in KDE that "just work" on basically every other system (including Windows and macOS). KIO, Akonadi and Baloo come to mind immediately - all great ideas that in reality never really work.

(I say this as someone who daily drives KDE on both Wayland and X11 - to me, the features are certainly worth dealing with the issues)

Barrin923 tahun yang lalu

To me KDE is overloaded with settings and menus, it looks outdated and Gnome leans a lot more into multi-workspace/keyboard controls rather than the Windows-like behavior and I prefer that.

dmytrish3 tahun yang lalu

I use KDE because I like its relatively polished design and philosophy of flexibility and empowering power users. I can and I do wrestle things that I don't like into a shape I like.

I still have to put up with many, many downsides around its stability, bugs, resource consumption, being written in C++ and builds being a nontrivial exercise.

I can sympathize with those for whom KDE does not suit well.

eitland3 tahun yang lalu

What distro do you use and what do you compare it to?

My preferred distro is KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu base but with KDE devs providing the KDE layer on top.

I have found this combination excellent and while I am sure it uses more resources than lightweight distros it actually seems to save me resources when I move load (IntelliJ, VSCode, Cypress) from my Windows host machine to my KDE running under WSL. Even on the limited memory and CPU I give this VM it seems to handle them a lot nicer than when I run the GUI apps in the host machine and only run Maven/Quarkus + Node + WSL part of VSCode on WSL.

And with the most recent update of WSL, running GUI apps from WSL has become effortless. (I admit some rough edges like IntelliJ sometimes freezing after suspend resume etc, but nothing that takes time or effort to resolve.)

dmytrish3 tahun yang lalu

My comment was overly dramatic, I'd say. I was implicitly comparing KDE to Apple-level quality in UI.

I am using KDE on Wayland on Fedora, and so far it's the most polished Linux desktop experience I've ever had.

Maybe it's my experience with KDE4 that turned me off after KDE3, then tidal changes of stability in KDE5 that undermined my trust.

przems3 tahun yang lalu

I guess everyone has their own reason, look-and-feel being a valid reason.

For me, it’s the wonky Active Directory integration/support that is the dealbreaker.

tpush3 tahun yang lalu

What kind of weird question is that? They're different things, obviously not everyone is going to like the same thing.

encryptluks23 tahun yang lalu

GTK != Gnome. KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it. One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.

michaelmrose3 tahun yang lalu

If you find yourself using the term bloated you should in most cases find a new word because it communications only imprecision. It neither uses excessive RAM, nor requires excessive storage, nor runs slowly. Do you mean it has too many features?

In the context of the prior comment which was choosing between Gnome and KDE the fact that applications require you to have half of KDE is meaningless as you are if you pick KDE going to install all of KDE already.

In the context of installing KDE apps outside of KDE this is fairly overblown. Most people have hundreds of GB to TB of storage available and will install games which require 60GB. At this point in time worrying about KDE installing a few gigs of deps is like worrying about the difference in ram used by Emacs vs Vim.

encryptluks23 tahun yang lalu

ElectricalUnion3 tahun yang lalu

> KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it.

I use GNOME myself but GNOME is anything but lean and stable - Alt+F2 r is for me a staple and it doesn't work correctly under Wayland, it's GUI is horribly slow, every extension worsening the problem. I mostly only use GNOME myself because I stopped caring about how slow things are and I'm lazy.

> One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.

Well, any GNOME thing wants to pull the entire GNOME thing AND systemd. Much worse.

encryptluks23 tahun yang lalu

zerr3 tahun yang lalu

From the name, I was hoping it to be written in Vala.

Operative01983 tahun yang lalu

Gnome doesn't need any more KDE Connect clients. GSConnect is pretty much perfect and most importantly, is integrated into the Quick Settings. What I have always been puzzled by is the near absence of KDE Connect clients for tiling compositors. I would love to one day use KDE Connect in a way that feels native for something like Sway.

tssva3 tahun yang lalu

This is not a Gnome client. It is a gtk based client which doesn't require Gnome. It is also from the author of GSConnect.

Operative01983 tahun yang lalu

GTK may be a universal GUI tool kit but the description "Gnome Tool Kit" is more appropriate.

bacchusracine3 tahun yang lalu

It's not about Gnome.

Other desktops exist that use GTK. Such as Mate, which is still a very decent desktop and show just how far Gnome has fallen in the past decade. Some of us are very happy to have an application which will work for us that doesn't require pulling in Gnome's junk or KDE's junk.

ghqst3 tahun yang lalu

This works on other desktops besides Gnome

Operative01983 tahun yang lalu

Pretty sure it works on Gnome as well. One would say that's the main target.

gremlinsinc3 tahun yang lalu

Would this run on just i3wm? Or do I need the gnome-i3 session?

Kukumber3 tahun yang lalu

That's a smartphone UX [1], why he need to have large vertical screen? I don't understand

[1] - https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj...

NayamAmarshe3 tahun yang lalu

I use Zorin connect, seems to work pretty well. This one looks cool too though.

jeroenhd3 tahun yang lalu

As far as I can tell, Zorin's connect apps are just forks/rebrands of various KDE Connect apps. KDE connect worked flawlessly with a Zorin VM last time I tried it.

coding1233 tahun yang lalu

Does this map gnome components to Qt based components?

jacooper3 tahun yang lalu

Gsconnect already exists?

viraptor3 tahun yang lalu

Yes, that's mentioned in the opening sentences along with a reason why it's different.

giancarlostoro3 tahun yang lalu

I used KDE Connect in the earlier years and am totally blanking out on what it is or does… I assume it forwards data from a KDE desktops widgets?

mcsniff3 tahun yang lalu

You know, reading the article would have answered your question, saving your time, my time from (voluntary) responding, and everyone else who reads this comment and subsequently also responds it.

I don't mean to be harsh, but really? There is entire bullet point list on the page, and yes, I didn't include it in my response. Ironic.

vlovich1233 tahun yang lalu

> KDE Connect provides various features to integrate your phone and your computer. It allows you to send files to the other device, control its media playback, send remote input, view its notifications and may things more. It is available for (mobile) Linux, Android, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS.[1]

Actually I read your response, then I read the article and still came away confused as to what it does, and I use Linux and KDE as the daily driver for work. So now you’ve wasted my time finding the answer to the question instead of just answering a question likely a lot of people will have. Yes, op could have googled that information themselves. However, the valid criticism of OP is that upon having that question they should have googled the answer and then posted their question with the answer proactively. But “did you even RTFA” is not a helpful meta discussion to have. It’s useful to check the comments first to see whether TFA is even worth reading so having this answered about a more obscure piece of software seems totally valid. And someone did paste the bulleted list of features for Valent itself in this thread too so the rhetoric is just a bit too sanctimonious at chewing out a fellow person without providing value to everyone else reading your comment.

[1] https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/

giancarlostoro3 tahun yang lalu

I upvoted the thread so I can look at it when I have free time, figured I would ask since when I skimmed I didnt see it.

rat99883 tahun yang lalu

my time from (voluntary) responding

This one is on you bro.

potatochup3 tahun yang lalu

It's a phone app that allows control of your desktop. you can control music, send files, use the camera from your phone to get pictures on the desktop, etc

jbverschoor3 tahun yang lalu

Doesn’t tell me anything.

How does it work? What apps are compatible? How is the connection between devices set up? Wire guard? If not, then what? How does it control apps and receive notifications?

At first it sounded to me like an alternative X11 thing

I hate it when projects/products only state what you can do (or at least what they envision), and not explaining the actual workings. Especially when data and access gets more and more important.

Same with I think it was postbox.. nice app, but they didn’t tell you that they need full access to your account, store “securely” on their server.. no thank you.

chupasaurus3 tahun yang lalu

> How does it work?

KDE framework has KIO library which provides network-transparent file access (that's why Konqueror works a file manager and a browser simultaneously). IIRC the author of KDE Connect was tinkering over sending notifications to a phone app and found out you can make much more with it.

> How is the connection between devices set up?

The server part uses 1716/UDP for broadcasting it's presence and 1716-1764/TCP to communicate with clients. The client had to be paired with server (like in Bluetooth), the communication is done via TLS, file browsing works over SFTP.

> How does it control apps and receive notifications?

Everything is done via plugins, both sides choose which ones are enabled and some have their own control schemes (i.e. whitelist of apps to sync notifications from phone).

jcelerier3 tahun yang lalu

> How does it work? What apps are compatible?

it integrates in the desktop UI (and standard protocols, e.g. D-Bus, the "share as..." feature, etc) & phone UI (and standard protocols, e.g. MPRIS, the Android "share" feature, etc), it's mostly not about apps but about the shell, although some apps have nice additional integrations through extensions, like firefox.

For instance:

- when I copy on my linux desktop I can paste on my phone

- I can share links, files, etc between phone and desktop trivially (through the usual android feature on the phone, and through right-click in my desktop)

- when I have media playing either in my desktop media player or in web browsers I can control the playback from the phone

- I can use my phone as a remote control when I give talks & presentations

- I see my phone notifications on my desktop

etc

It's really the only thing that makes Android remotely tolerable for me.

cycomanic3 tahun yang lalu

I am quite the opposite, many projects now just have a wall of text about the technology they use, but completely utred to explain in simple terms what it does. It seems some devs assume that everyone can guess from the tech stack. By all means have a page explaining the technology, but the front page should tell me what I can do with it.

jbverschoor3 tahun yang lalu

Well you need both.. What does it do and why. And then how. The how needs to be somewhere if it's not something super standard, and even then I think it's best to explain. Because things are simply not obvious.

vorpalhex3 tahun yang lalu

It is a way for your phone to interface with your computer, allowing bidirectional notifications, media control, clipboard and file transfer.

It works VERY well. The app itself mostly stays out of the way and things "just work". No noticeable latency even using the remote keyboard functionality.