Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver?

[Kevin Kofler]

the inability to transfer files besides an awkward workaround of pulling out a microsd card (I couldn't figure out proposed SSH or syncthing or other solutions, although they apparently work for others - I think this is solvable but I saw even a recent post where someone was struggling with it and I couldn't follow along with their solution. This was a major use case functionality failure, as I wanted to type things up and transfer them over off the Pinephone and was unable to do so - I had expected I could just plug the device in to a computer or a usb stick to transfer files back and forth);

SFTP should just work for transfering files. Make sure sshd is enabled on the PinePhone:

• First check your /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the phone to make sure it is reasonably secure. In particular, you want these:
  
  Code:

  PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
  because, considering how trivial the PIN-style user passwords normally used on Plasma Mobile are, you definitely do not want to rely on those for authentication. Instead, put your desktop/notebook's public key in the PinePhone's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. (Only if you cannot figure out a way to set this up without using SFTP, copy the file over SFTP with password authentication temporarily enabled and then immediately disable it. But it is more secure if you transfer the public key using a USB stick or a MicroSD card.)
  
• Enable sshd with
  
  Code:

  sudo systemctl enable --now sshd.service

Then whenever you wish to transfer files from/to the PinePhone:

• Make sure both your desktop/notebook and your PinePhone are connected to the same WLAN (wireless local area network, i.e., WiFi network).
  
• Run
  
  Code:

  ip addr
  on the PinePhone to figure out its current IPv4 address. (If you are on your home network, you can probably get your WiFi router to assign a static IP address that you can then, if you cannot or do not want to remember it, give a static name through the /etc/hosts file on your desktop/notebook.)
  
• Point your favorite GUI file manager on the desktop/notebook to sftp:// + the IPv4 address you got above. (Pretty much any GNU/Linux GUI file manager supports SFTP out of the box.)
  

It is really no different than transfering files between 2 GNU/Linux computers.