How should pinephone integrate with Desktop?

[gamerminstrel]

Right now, if you have an Android device and a Chromebook there is some pretty slick integration between the two. Really things like your text messages will sync onto the Chromebook if you let it, and you can pair up tabs (assuming you use chrome on Android). Supposedly something similar happens between iPhone and Macbooks, but I will never own those devices to find out.

This kind of integration is cool and convenient to a lot of people. I know Firefox will let you sync tabs in theory, but is there a way to sync things like text messages or notifications?

Do you think the Pinephone should be able to pair up with a Linux desktop in the same way? I like the idea personally, but the Pinephone seems to be changing the paradigm with convergence. Why sync up to a desktop/laptop when it can *become* the desktop when plugged into a dock?

[wibble]

A good chunk of sync should work as it does on a deskltop - contacts, calendar, email etc.
kdeconnect can already do the things it usually does between desktops, including file transfer and notifications. It doesn't yet do the phone side of SMS access like the android app can though - that still needs implementing, and will probably be different between phosh and plasma-mobile as they use different ways to talk to the modem and handle SMS/MMS.
Nextcloud is another option for SMS sync, but needs a linux equivalent of the android app to be written. Again this probably needs to be different for plasma-mobile and phosh.

[bosi564]

Do you think the Pinephone should be able to pair up with a Linux desktop in the same way? I like the idea personally, but the Pinephone seems to be changing the paradigm with convergence. Why sync up to a desktop/laptop when it can *become* the desktop when plugged into a dock?

Well, in all seriousness, I just tried Emacs and I think we can have it both ways if we make it the default desktop shell.

[rogerco]

Nextcloud is another option for SMS sync, but needs a linux equivalent of the android app to be written. 

err, that (Nextcloud sync for linux) already exists. See http://ppa.launchpad.net/nextcloud-devs/client/ubuntu. This is only Ubuntu and Debian, there is also a Fedora, Arch and Open Suse client and maybe more. Also an appimage and a flatpak. Can appimages work on Manjaro? This might be another reason to switch to Ubuntu on the Pine phone since I haven't got it working at all using the supplied Manjaro image - basically nothing seems to work.

Maybe I'll get time to have a play with something different soon; for now my Pine project is on the back burner as it is nowhere near as functional as I had hoped to start with. I did know it was a development toy, but I thought the beta might at least have basic functions working :-(

[wibble]

Nextcloud is another option for SMS sync, but needs a linux equivalent of the android app to be written. 

err, that (Nextcloud sync for linux) already exists. See http://ppa.launchpad.net/nextcloud-devs/client/ubuntu.

Isn''t that ppa for the file sync client only? I'm talking about an equivalent to https://github.com/nerzhul/ncsms-android to sync SMS with https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ocsms

[wibble]

On the kdeconnect side, https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh/-/issues/514 is a feature request covering this, with a preliminary version and some discussion of the SMS part, along with potential sandboxing issues and the difficulty of implementing the clipboard sharing under wayland. For plasma-mobile there's https://phabricator.kde.org/T8968 but it's a bit confusing in that the SMS dependency task doesn't mention https://phabricator.kde.org/tag/spacebar/ which seems to be their SMS app.

[Skraaj]

Before we have an all in one solution - is it possible to at least have phone and laptop on the same network and maybe use x-forwarding to manipulate phone from laptop? Like use laptop's mic and speakers for calls and have a window displaying whatever's on the phone right now. If yes, what could I use? Never used x-forwarding and I kind of feel like doing that over SSH is NOT the way to go

My phone's supposed to come tomorrow and I'm already curious if that can be done

Contacts and calendar should be easy with a raspberry at home with caldav/carddav. But texts and everything else phone-related might be a challenge

[wibble]

Forwarding over ssh works for individual applications, sometimes needing an environment variable or cli setting to get them to start using X rather than Wayland. Wayland complicates things somewhat, and I don't know if we've got anything for sharing the whole display yet. Your best bet for using the laptop's mic and speakers would probably be emulating a bluetooth headset, but I've not tried that since before the PinePhone existed. It used to work...mostly. In theory you could share audio over the network via PulseAudio, but I think you'd need some work on the audio profiles at the phone end to get the audio routing to work for calls.

[Zebulon Walton]

Forwarding over ssh works for individual applications, sometimes needing an environment variable or cli setting to get them to start using X rather than Wayland. Wayland complicates things somewhat, and I don't know if we've got anything for sharing the whole display yet. Your best bet for using the laptop's mic and speakers would probably be emulating a bluetooth headset, but I've not tried that since before the PinePhone existed. It used to work...mostly. In theory you could share audio over the network via PulseAudio, but I think you'd need some work on the audio profiles at the phone end to get the audio routing to work for calls.

I have full display sharing working using wayvnc. It's not available as a package last time I checked so it has to be built from sources. Works quite well, but video only, no audio.

https://github.com/any1/wayvnc

Specific instructions for Debian Bullseye:

https://github.com/any1/wayvnc/issues/81

On the other hand, while X forwarding works for individual applications the performance is terrible. (The X wire protocol is ancient and it's a pig.)

[TRS-80]

Emacs

I see you are a fellow man of distinction!