Over the years, many solutions have come around for linking your phone to your PC in an attempt to improve your productivity or simply make things more seamless as you move from one device to another. Apple is arguably the most notorious and successful in this endeavour, though Microsoft has been trying hard to replicate it with its Phone Link app.
But unbeknownst to most people, there's a solution that may be even better than both of those. It's called KDE Connect, and it has some features you won't even find in Apple's tightly integrated ecosystem, which I've found fascinating.
I tested KDE Connect between my phone running Android 16 (specifically, LineageOS 23.2) and my laptop running Arch Linux with KDE Plasma, and frankly, the setup process was incredibly easy. With the app installed on both devices, my laptop immediately appeared as an available device on my phone, and linking the two was instant. I was also able to access the features I'm going to talk about immediately without much setup, either.
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Remote control
It goes both ways
One of the most interesting features of KDE Connect is its remote control capabilities, which work both ways once you have linked two devices. Sure, there's the basic multimedia controls, and that's pretty nice already, since you can play, pause, skip, and adjust the volume on the remote device, making it easy to control either device using the other. But that's not the best part.
On my phone, opening the Remote control feature turns my screen into a large touchpad with two mouse buttons underneath, and it works surprisingly well. In an instant, I can use my phone to fully control my computer, moving the mouse around, clicking, and then even typing into whatever text box I select.
Yes, KDE Connect even lets me use my phone's default keyboard to type anything I want into text boxes on my PC, and this works very seamlessly. Everything about this experience is better than I would have expected, and it's not something you can do this smoothly at all with other solutions of this kind.
It also works in reverse, in that you can use a computer to control a pointer on your phone and use the physical keyboard on your laptop to type, though this does require you to switch inputs on your phone, since Android only accepts keyboard inputs from one app at a time. It's not quite as seamless, but it still works very well.
KDE Connect even lets you set up a list of terminal commands you can run remotely to launch apps or perform certain actions, as long as they don't require sudo rights. For example, I can open the Vicinae launcher using the vicinae toggle command, though I would then need to switch to remote control mode to use the keyboard to enter a command.
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It's even a presentation remote
And it uses... motion controls?
This is somewhat tangential to remote control, but I think it deserves its own spotlight because it's cool in a different way. If you've ever had to present a slideshow in front of an audience, you've probably either sed or wished you could use a presentation remote to skip slides and point at things on the screen, and KDE Connect can do exactly that.
It's not an in-depth feature, but I can launch the presentation remove on my phone, and it lets me move to the next slide or go back to the previous one easily, and where it gets weird is the pointer functionality. It wouldn't really be feasible to move the pointer using just the touchscreen, so instead, KDE Connect has you tap the screen to enable the pointer, and then relies on your phone's gyroscope to point it at different parts of the screen, almost as if you were pointing a real laser pointer at the screen.
This may take some getting used to, but it's an incredibly novel way to use your phone as a presentation remote, and I love it as a result. The fact that this is possible at all with such a simple app is fantastic.
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Share the clipboard and more
It's all easy to move around
Another very cool thing about KDE Connect is how seamlessly you can send content from one device to another. This comes in a couple of forms, the first being that you can easily send files between the two devices. Of course, that's not really new, but sending files is fairly fast and it works well while being completely independent from the internet, so that's already a plus.
But what's perhaps more interesting is how easily you can share content from the clipboard from one device to another, and this also works both ways. You can copy text on your phone and send it to the clipboard on your PC, where you can paste it into a message or anywhere else, and vice versa. It's not automatic, at least by default, but it's still a great feature to have.
This clipboard manager should be built into every operating system by default
Windows, and Ditto for Mac and Linux.
KDE Connect does even more
These are just some of the more unique features of KDE Connect, but it can do even more useful things, like sync notifications from your phone to your PC (and vice versa, though that part is off by default), see battery levels, or even ring your phone in case you've misplaced it. There are plenty of reasons to give KDE Connect a shot, and the best part is that it isn't locked down to a specific platform. While it may function best on Linux and Android, KDE Connect has a client for Windows and macOS, and it also supports iOS phones, too.
It's worth giving it a shot to see how the features can benefit you, especially because it also respects your privacy and doesn't require any sort of online account. It just works within your Wi-Fi network, and you're golden.