Valent Is a KDE Connect Client for GTK-Based Desktops

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

by logix • 3 years ago

202 87 3 years ago

jonas-w4• 3 years ago

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.

seszett• 3 years ago

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).

jwrallie• 3 years ago

What's wrong with surrounding yourself with qt?

jonas-w4• 3 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro2• 3 years ago

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?

potatochup• 3 years ago

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

jbverschoor2• 3 years ago

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.

mcsniff• 3 years ago

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.

vlovich123• 3 years ago

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/

rat9988• 3 years ago

my time from (voluntary) responding

This one is on you bro.

giancarlostoro2• 3 years ago

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.

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

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.

NayamAmarshe• 3 years ago

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

jeroenhd2• 3 years ago

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.

coolgoose• 3 years ago

Wasted the opportunity to call it Konnect :p

JasonFruit• 3 years ago

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. )

mixmastamyk• 3 years ago

How about Gonnect?

Smar• 3 years ago

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

Centigonal• 3 years ago

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

skykooler• 3 years ago

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.

harry8• 3 years ago

Signal "note to self" is another way.

JustSomeNobody• 3 years ago

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.

Kukumber• 3 years ago

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...

coding123• 3 years ago

Does this map gnome components to Qt based components?

reocha• 3 years ago

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

tssva3• 3 years ago

This is from the same author.

jonas-w4• 3 years ago

Valent is from Andy Holmes.

GSConnect is from Daniel Landau.

vanderZwan2• 3 years ago

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.

shaan7• 3 years ago

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

IshKebab• 3 years ago

They should probably rename it.

TuringTest• 3 years ago

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?

saghm• 3 years ago

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!

iudqnolq2• 3 years ago

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).

vanderZwan2• 3 years ago

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.

zerr• 3 years ago

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

jacooper• 3 years ago

Gsconnect already exists?

viraptor• 3 years ago

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

gremlinsinc• 3 years ago

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

eitland8• 3 years ago

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?

encryptluks2• 3 years ago

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.

michaelmrose• 3 years ago

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.

ElectricalUnion• 3 years ago

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.

przems• 3 years ago

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.

franga2000• 3 years ago

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)

chungy2• 3 years ago

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.

tpush• 3 years ago

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

Barrin92• 3 years ago

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.

dmytrish2• 3 years ago

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.

eitland8• 3 years ago

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.)

Operative01983• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

ghqst• 3 years ago

This works on other desktops besides Gnome

Operative01983• 3 years ago

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

bacchusracine• 3 years ago

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.

Valent Is a KDE Connect Client for GTK-Based Desktops

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