I just had to email me a file I got sent to my phone and I feel unable to accept this as the better solution.
What you do guys use for inter-device communication?
My dad found one solution that’s specifically for the task (whose name eludes me at the moment), but for me, my nextcloud is a Swiss army knife.
kde connect for most things
copyparty for the rest
Honestly, syncthing, croc, vaultwarden send, Send (fork of firefox’s send before they discontinued it, still works), Privatebin, etc.
- syncthing (file synchronization)
- kdeconnect (file transfers, clipboard sharing, presentation remote)
- deskflow (keyboard and mouse sharing)
- warpinator (one off file sharing)
- rsync / scp (one off file copies / backups)
LocalSend on both devices is something I’ve used
I also like LocalSend. Not quite as automagical as airdrop but it’s cross platform
I would argue it being cross-platform is magical.
There also copyparty. I don’t personally used it but their release video is fun AF.
For sending files between a phone and a PC, I use KDE Connect.
For sending files between PCs, I use SSH.
Both are really simple and lightweight tools that normally come preinstalled, and you can use them with no configuration.
Adding to this, there’s a gnome extension so you can use KDE connect without KDE DE.
You can use KDE Connect itself without KDE.
But GSConnect shows up in the equivalent of your task bar
So does KDE Connect. It’s a standalone program that happens to also be integrated into the KDE DE.
No, not on GNOME Desktops, that’s the reason you need to install GSConnect on GNOME. If you install just KDE Connect on a GNOME system, you will not have it integrated.
Ohhhhhhhhhh
Man I need to read better
Syncthing. I connect both devices to same Wi-Fi, copy a file to a shared directory, and wait a minute.
There’s PairDrop, you can self host it but iirc it transfer via webrtc so as long as the devices ‘see’ one another there’s no mitm.
This is based on Snapdrop. If the current developer hasn’t gone crazy with the fork, you can read the entire source code over a cup of coffee. The server used to just handle discovery/handshake of devices on the same network, with file transfer peer to peer using local addresses.
Edit: Looks like they’ve added transfer over WAN not just local. Privacy discussion here.
Most of the time I use Nextcloud. If I can’t wait for the file to sync I’ll use either email or a jump drive depending on which devices I’m moving data between. I
If I remember that I can, I’ll occasionally use bluetooth to send from my phone to one of my computers.
Thumb drive.
Taildrop if you use Tailscale.
<offtopic> It’d be nice if there’s a Syncthing built into Tailscale or some of the mesh VPN solutions. Taildrop is good but it’s not entire directory sync with proper conflict resolution.
Surely I can use Syncthing inside Tailscale but 1. I have to depend on their public discoservers, or 2. I have to host and configure the discoserv myself for every client which is tedious to do </offtopic>
In syncthing you can configure ip of a device and you can turn off discovery. You can add devices by id or scanning qr of the id. I have been using that for years since I didn’t want third party servers in the equation…
USB Stick and USB wire?
no need to fiddle with an app, nothing to configure, no updates, works even with relatively big file sizes, surprisingly fast?
I always have SSH everywhere on everything and I could never understand why anyone ever would want to make it more complicated than that.
Most people probably don’t care but it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices. For my main devices I don’t give them SSH access to each other, but I do give them SSH access to my secondary devices (like a Pi-Hole)
[…] it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices.
Unless you do something incredibly stupid, such as allowing keyless login or sharing keys (or having unencrypted keys or keys without a passphrase, seriously), I find it hard to see how that would actually happen in practice.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
My point is that SSH access is very powerful, and effectively means that the security of the SSH server is reduced to the security of the SSH client. If your SSH client is pwned, so is your server. If you have 10 devices each with ssh access to each other, then if any one device is pwned, all devices are pwned as well.
This is not the case for systems designed for file sharing only. For example with syncthing, if one device gets pwned, all it can do is send files to the other devices.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
Sure, it’s just that from my point-of-view I’d be toast anyway if anyone managed to gain that level of access.
SSH or a USB stick that has USB 3 on one end and USB C on the other
I have sftp setup on my 2 main PCs and a client on my phone (it’s not a server). For the rest of the family who have dual Mint/Windows boots I also have warpinator installed on mine and theirs - it’s point to point for the enrolled devices but is currently only setup to work within the LAN.
Primary filesharing is simply the NAS which is visible to all devices on the LAN (can be made available externally but I haven’t). This is a recent addition and no one uses warpinator any more.
Edit to clarify I don’t have sftp server on phone
Might want to boot up warpinator myself, but from their website:
#Winpinator for Windows PC
For Windows users, this software is readily available for the Windows platform, allowing easy installation of both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It facilitates seamless file and folder sharing between Microsoft Windows and Linux via LAN.
It seems like there might be a slight error in your question. It’s possible that you’re referring to “WinZip” instead of “Winpinator.” WinZip is a popular file compression and archive utility for Windows. If you’re looking for information on WinZip, you can visit the official WinZip website to download and learn more about the application: WinZip Official Website.
???
It looks like some FAQ answer has leaked into their main website. At a quick dig it seems that Winpinator is the original name for the windows port of warpinator
