GS Connect as part of 18.10

[willcooke]

Hi all,

I will publish an insights post later this week covering all the things we’d like to get done in the Cosmic cycle, but I wanted to get the conversation kicked off about this one right away.

GS Connect (https://github.com/andyholmes/gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect) is a GNOME Shell implementation of KDE Connect (https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect) without the KDE/Qt dependancies. This will make it easier to ship with 18.10 without having to pull in a load of new dependencies and increase further the ISO size.

I’ve briefly spoken to Andy Holmes the upstream developer to see how he’d feel about this, and he’s +1 on the idea.

I’d love for this to work in the same way as we did with Ubuntu Dock & Dash-to-Dock (https://github.com/micheleg/dash-to-dock/tree/ubuntu-do) where we have a branch in the upstream project rather than forking. Andy is happy for us to work in that way and we’ll be able to contribute fixes etc directly to the upstream project.

@3v1n0 has volunteered for this work from the Desktop team.

Is there anyone else in the community who’d like to help work on this too?

I’m really excited to see this land as a feature of Ubuntu. KDE Connect is a really useful tool, if you haven’t played with it it’s worth checking out. The latest version of GS Connect works fine in Bionic.

Maybe someone would be interested in porting the phone side app to iOS?

Cheers, Will

[jyaku]

Is GS Connect just going to control the desktop from the phone? Or will we be able to access the phone from the desktop? Maybe as a long term goal?

And will that be Android focused or even iPhone compatible?

It would be nice if the upcoming PURISM phone would be compatible…

[huluti]

It works both ways.

For now there is only an Android app.

EDIT: Personaly, I think it’s a great idea. Apple and Microsoft already do this and it’s very useful.

[wpieterson]

Great idea and a very useful addition to 18.10. Am not a developer, but happy to help with testing/bug reporting (and brainstorming new features, etc.)

[c-lobrano]

I’d love to help, just not sure how much free time I’ll have after communitheme

[stephen-d-allen]

This is a great extension, have been using it for several months in Gnome.

[mohan-ram]

Great idea, I love it. Been using KDE Connect since finding out about it, and also tried out MConnect. Both worked great. Not test out GS Connect on Bionic, and so far it is great. Works well, and keeps me up-to-date. I do have a few Android phones that I have access to, and would help out in testing. I also have an iPhone, and if there is an iPhone app made available in the future I would like help test that one as well.

[didrocks]

A note for @3v1n0: as we now have a distro patch to force loading extensions from the system using for extensions mode, we aren’t forced to fork the ID anymore if no changes in user experience are required and directly use the upstream version.

[3v1n0]

@didrocks Yeah, indeed… That’s a great benefit indeed.
Also probably should be the case to move the “forks” we have to that too.

[thisu]

According to this, someone already made a client for iOS, apparently.

And here’s old code base for a kdeconnect iOS client(GSoC project from 2014), https://cgit.kde.org/scratch/yangqiao/kdeconnect-ios.git/

[robert.ancell]

Does anyone know if instant tethering is a feature that we would get through something like GSConnect?

[jyaku]

According to the Trello card this was deferred to Ubuntu 19.10.

For Disco we will have to install the extension by ourselves.