My experience with KDE Connect

February 27, 2026#linux #android #kde #foss

Few days ago I installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop for development work. On my main workstation I use Arch alongside Hyprland, but here I wanted something that’s still bleeding-edge but gives me a little bit of stability in case I don’t use the laptop for a while. I picked the KDE Desktop Environment, because I always somewhat liked it and I feel like it’s lightweight enough for the Pentium Silver N5000. It’s been a while since I tested KDE too, I wanted to see if there are any changes that I might like.

This time I decided to indoctrinate myself a little bit into KDE Ecosystem and the first thing I really wanted to try was KDE Connect. Main functionality I was looking for was notification sharing and sending text messages from my Android phone, but I got so much more! Here’s the process I took and my thoughts about it.

1. Installing KDE Connect

I found installation process on both laptop and phone really easy.

1.1 On a Laptop

On OpenSuse Tumbleweed it was as simple as just running one command in the terminal:

zypper install kdeconnect

This installed everything and KDE Connect was ready to use.

1.2 On a Phone

I installed this package from the F-Droid repository on my android phone. There is a lot of sensitive permissions that this app needs, I made sure all of them are set up right.

2. Connecting my devices together

After preparing both of my devices I had to pair them together. I made sure they are on the same network and can see each other. I opened up the application on my computer and waited for my phone to show up. After initiating the pairing on one device I just had to confirm on the other and everything was done!

3. Testing functionality

The features I tested mostly worked very well. I did not test everything yet, but here’s what I did use so far:

Sharing notifications from my Android phone to the Computer was never so easy. This feature is enabled and works out of the box.

3.2 Browsing my phone from the computer and the other way around

I was able to send files from my computer to my phone without any issues. It also works the other way around, but android phone can only send files. There is no interface to browse like there is on my computer.

3.3 Ring my phone

I used this feature few times to find my phone, I tend to leave it around somewhere all the time. With that feature I was easily able to find it. One gripe with it is that you can’t really customize the ringtone on your phone.

This mostly works although sometimes you have to copy things few times for it to actually register. Works both ways.

3.5 Sending text messages

This feature works very well, but only for plain text messages. RCS chats did not work for me.

4. Final thoughts

There is definitely more features to test out, like remote control and sending commands remotly. I might update this blog post if I test out more of them.

I’m very pleased with KDE Connect, this is one of the coolest pieces of FOSS I’ve used lately and I will be using it in the future.