Clear-Cut Design

You can reach NitroShare's very clear-cut configuration dialog via Settings in the context menu. In the Settings dialog, you can specify whether the application launches after you log in at computer boot time and set the directories in which NitroShare stores the data (Figure 4). If necessary, you can also modify the port numbers in this dialog; they must be identical on all machines involved in order to enable a connection. The Security tab also offers the option to set up transport encryption in line with the current Transport Layer Security (TLS) standard. However, you do need third-party applications to generate the keys and certificates required for this encryption.

Figure 4: The Settings dialog offers options for setting NitroShare's behavior.

Desktop Integration

NitroShare integrates with the file managers of popular desktop environments using the appropriate add-on modules, allowing data to be sent directly from the desktop. You will find the corresponding packages in each distribution's software repositories. In addition, NitroShare promises support for the Nautilus, Caja, and Nemo file managers. In our lab, however, it was not possible to integrate the application into the Caja file manager on Linux Mint 20 and Ubuntu Mate 20.04. Although NitroShare builds on the Qt5 framework, with the exception of openSUSE, amazingly there are no modules for integration into the context menus for either KDE's Dolphin or Konqueror file managers.

Syncthing

The free Syncthing [4] is not designed for the occasional transfer of single files. Instead, it keeps larger datasets synchronized between two computers. Unlike locally installed cloud services, for example, Syncthing does not need a server or the complex configuration that entails.

Countless variants of Syncthing, developed in Go, are available for a wide variety of platforms, including 32- and 64-bit versions for Linux and the Raspberry Pi. It also runs on smartphones and tablets running Android. You will also find the source code on the project page. Syncthing with a GTK-based graphical front end is included in the repositories of numerous distributions. This is also where you will find packages that automatically start the program when you log in to a computer.