Building Bridges

KDE developers have been working for more than a year to extend KDE Plasma to the mobile world. The current project, under the name Plasma Mobile, is geared to provide a free platform for mobile devices some time in the future, thus acting as an alternative to existing platforms [1]. Since Google Summer of Code 2015 (GSoC 015), an application has connected Android and BlackBerry devices with the Plasma desktop and supported some reciprocal functional control.

Spanish developer Albert Vaca aptly dubbed the application KDE Connect [2], which is available for Linux and FreeBSD, with clients for Android and BlackBerry. An iOS version is currently being built, as well. Users can meaningfully connect PCs, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones on the home network. Additionally, extensions for Firefox [3] and Chrome [4] send URLs from the desktop to Android devices. With the kdeconnect-cli command, you can control KDE Connect in a terminal (Figure 1).

In September 2016, KDE Connect reached version 1.0, which incorporates several important innovations. Most distributions are not packaging this version right now, but that is likely to change in the near future. The associated packages in the archives of the distributions are typically named kdeconnect; for Ubuntu – depending on the version – this is kdeconnect-kde or kdeconnect-plasma. If necessary, you can build the latest 1.0.1 version from source code.

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