I recently transitioned from Windows to Linux Mint and am looking for an app to control basic phone functions from my desktop, with a reliable file transfer feature as the top priority.
I tested KDE Connect, but while pairing and basic features (clipboard, media control) partially work, several core functions fail completely. Most importantly, file transfer from phone to PC does not work at all (the UI dead-ends after selecting files), and the “Find my Phone” alarm cannot be stopped without force-stopping the app. I did also remember I did somehow manage to get my phone desktop mirrored to the PC, but writing this I wasn’t able to reproduce the functionality, failed to find any control to initiate it.
Can anyone recommend a stable, modern alternative to KDE Connect for Linux Mint and Android, or assist me in getting this thing to work properly?
KDE Connect does seem to work best in a KDE environment, it seems.
But there is GS Connect which is sort of a port of KDEConnect for Gnome. Not sure if this works any better on your Cinnamon desktop, though.
A bug perhaps? I am not seeing that here, but others have. I know that in the past, only single file transfers seemed to work from phone>PC, using Dolphin at least. I have no issues sending multiple files in that direction, but this is using both the current KDEConnect and KDE Plasma desktop and Dolphin releases.
Also note that the KDE Connect version you have in Mint (which is actually Kubuntu’s 24.04) is about two and a half years old now. There is a small chance that the mobile app and desktop software can be a bit too separated, version-wise. Though I have not seen this sort of situation happen myself in a long while. The older version of the desktop software might be the source of the file selection issue you are seeing.
Primarily for clipboard sync and getting phone notifications on my PC, as well as transferring files.
Haven’t really used any other features much and I deactivated some, e.g. stopping media players on incoming calls.
I think I have only transferred single files myself as well but that works highly reliable.
At least once a week I use this to transfer a large backup file from my phone to my PC.
I have occasionally done transfers the other way around but can’t remember of any of those were more than one file.
That is probably more a question for the Mint community.
I think people who use GNOME use GSConnect on the PC side, Mint might have that or a fork of it. They are usually more on the GNOME side of technology stack.
I use it daily for a number of things. The one thing that isn’t available for me on Android though is screen mirroring so I use adb and scrcpy to fill that requirement. It can be connected at the same time as KDEconnect.
Same version on Android but 26.04.02 on the PC side.
I guess I had a different version on Android back when I had 23.08 on PC.
Depends a bit on which Mint
Mint on Debian (LMDE) should have the packages from Trixie and that is at 25.04.2 according to packages.debian.org
There might also be a different PC side component recommended for Mint like there is for GNOME. However that might then again depend on which desktop environment of Mint is being used
I’ve also replaced KDE Connect with LocalSend. It does exactly what I want, and my phone doesn’t need to maintain a constant connection to the computer just for the occasional file transfer.
Sure, but the OP is not on LMDE, unfortunately, in terms of KDEconnect.
Normal Mint comes with Cinnamon, which is Gtk, but probably not gtk4, but GSConnect might be an alternative that works better on the more Gnome-ish desktop, maybe? At least it might better integrate into whatever filemanager Mint has, so it may work better for file transfers, maybe, hopefully, perhaps?
A quick browse on Mint’s forums doesn’t reveal much as to whether one works better than the other.
Back then it was perfect for me since the only thing I do is transferring files back and forth and kdeconnect just gave up. Although I find it to be faster than connect, that’s just what it does, files.
Everyone already said it, but I’ll say it too. I use it all the time. I dual-boot Windows and Arch with KDE and in both cases KDE Connect works without any problems. It’s simple and I prefer it over Phone Link or whatever Windows offers.
That said if it doesn’t work for you then perhaps you could try looking into:
