Devices: Bazzite Laptop, GrapheneOS Pixel 9, Boox Tab X

I’m annoyed with the functionality of KDEConnect at present. I very much like the concept, but there is friction preventing what should be a convenience from reaching its potential. Right now, I can mount the filesystem of connected devices on my laptop, but every time I do so I have to bypass an access restricted sign and do Ctrl+L to append storage/emulated/0 to the IP address of the connected device to actually access the mounted filesystem. Further, if there is more than one device, the two filesystems are practically indistinguishable from one another: I just spent about 5 minutes digging through the pictures on my tablet before I realized I was browsing the wrong device

  1. Is there a way to automatically append storage/emulated/0 every time the device is mounted?

  2. Is there a way to rename the filesystems so that I can easily distinguish between my phone and tablet?

Some other problems less directly important to what I would like to incorporate into my workflow:

I occasionally experience strange, unexplained disconnections/refusals to connect with the kdeconnect protocol, despite being connected by wifi, bluetooth, direct usb tether, or any combination thereof. This problem is infrequent and intermittent, and the only consistent solution seems to be restarting the affected device (usually the pixel).

  1. Am I missing something about connecting devices; is there a log I can check for some kind of device error?

I’d appreciate some way to stream the screen from one device to another. Nothing major, but it would have been convenient a couple of times now, and it seems like an obvious addition to the capabilities.

  1. Is something like that in the works? If not, what is the reason it’s not? What would allow me to do this?
  • Applesause@mander.xyzOPEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Well I just thought it was neat I could screen record but whatevs, screenshots will probably get it done with a bit of explanation.

    Image 1: File manager open, preparing to mount devices.

    Image 2: Devices mounted, preparing to open filesystem on first device.

    Image 3: Attempted to open filesystem on first device, met with access denied.

    Image 4: Bypassed access denied, appended storage/emulated/0 to filesystem mount point(? i think im saying that right), filesystem now accessible.

    Use Your Imagination 1: Opened filesystem on device 2, bypassed access denied, appended system/emulated/0 again, able to access filesystem.

    Use Your Imagination 2: Attempted to open filesystem on device 1 again, access denied again, appended system/emulated/0 again, able to access file system again.

    Ad Nauseum every time I want to access the filesystem on these devices remotely. It might actually be faster to just email myself the files. Probably less frustrating, too.

    Does that explain it? You can also see how it would be easy to mix up which device I’m browsing because they are both called some random jumbled numbers with similar android file names instead of “phone” and “tablet” or something human like that

    • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      OK, I’m not that familiar with KDE Connect itself so it’s possible that it may have some built-in configuration for this (mounting a subpath directly instead of the root).

      What you can hopefully do to make this easier without knowing more about KDE Connect is using symlinks.

      Assuming the mount paths (which include IP address and port) are static, you can symlink them to more conventient locations. For example:

      # find sftp mount path, assuming kio-fuse enabled  
find /run/user/$(id -u)/kio-fuse-* -type d -name emulated  
mkdir -p ~/Connected/  
ln -s /run/user/..../emulated/0 ~/Connected/MyTablet

      Then you can bookmark those locations in the file manager.

      This will only work with the static IP (or make KDEC mount on a path not including ip:port) and how to do that depends on over what protocol you connect.

      Just for telling the filesystems apart I guess you could also put an empty file or folder like emulated/0/00_MyTablet which will at least make it obvious where you are when you list the root.

      • Applesause@mander.xyzOPEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Well that sounds like solutions, but I’m gonna scratch my head about the whole thing you just said for a bit tbh.

        • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          If you have the option to “run a terminal here” then you can run pwd from there to get the current directory path.