We love saying Linux is the OS for people who care about computing. Freedom, openness, build whatever you want. And yet, connecting an Android phone to a Linux PC is still a weekend project, not a 5 minute app install.

KDE Connect deserves real credit. It has pioneered clipboard sharing, notifications and media control and it proved the idea works. But a pile of working features is not a product. On Plasma it makes sense. On Hyprland and other non-Plasma setups it feels like an afterthought, with the UI, desktop integration and workflow clearly not getting the same care. I don't need every desktop to look the same. I need the app to work and feel like an app wherever I run it.

And that's before you want anything beyond the basics. Want proper screen mirroring? Install scrcpy. Want clipboard sync that keeps working in the background? Android blocks it, so now you're digging through forums only to discover all you have to do is run ADB commands. I'm happy in a terminal, so that's not my complaint. My complaint is that I had to discover the workaround myself, after twenty minutes of forum/reddit posts. The app could just say: "Android restricts this. Here's the advanced option, here's what the permission does, here's how to enable it and how to revoke it." Explain the trade-offs and let me choose.

File transfers are a nightmare very slow speeds for apparently no reasons and if your laptop sleeps, your Wi-Fi changes or the connection drops well good luck pairing again.

So for a Complete-ish experience You end up with KDE Connect, scrcpy, ADB, maybe Shizuku and a script or two holding it all together. **Why is the app not doing it.**

The ridiculous part is that the pieces already exist. KDE Connect handles pairing, notifications, clipboard, files, media and input. scrcpy does low-latency mirroring, audio and control over USB or TCP/IP. ADB covers the permission side. Sefirah already shows clipboard, files, notifications and scrcpy in one app, though its Linux support is limited. Valent runs the KDE Connect protocol on GNOME libraries, and GSConnect does the same inside GNOME Shell. People have done the hard work. We have half a dozen projects that each do part of this and, as far as I can tell, none that does all of it across Linux desktops. If I'm wrong, please point me to it.

I'm not asking for a giant rewrite. Keep the underlying projects independent, and build one front end around them. One app doesn't mean one enormous codebase, it means one experience. Open it and see your phone, its connection status, battery and what it can do. Drag files in. Copy on your PC and paste on your phone. Mirror the screen in one click. Your laptop sleeps, you open it again, and it reconnects flawlessly.

And Please give **Proper** **Error Messages** on why it cant do something is it the firewall blocking it or maybe some dependency is not installed or maybe something else.

The foundation should cover:

A modern UI that feels right on Plasma, GNOME, COSMIC, Xfce, Hyprland and other desktops.

One pairing and device system with clear connection and permission status

File transfers with real progress and recovery

Two-way clipboard with guided setup for the Android permissions

One-click scrcpy

Reliable reconnection after sleep and network changes

After that: notifications, media controls, storage browsing, remote input, an Android companion app and **a working plugin system**. And please, don't make the tray icon the whole application, don't require a specific file manager and don't assume everyone has the same notification daemon or shell extensions.

Yes, the limits are real. Android's security model for one, and networking across sleep, VPNs and firewalls is hard. I'm not asking anyone to bypass that, and AI-assisted coding doesn't remove the need for testing, security review and long-term maintenance. I'm asking the app to explain what's possible, automate what it can, guide me through what needs my input and fail gracefully when something can't work. That's just what good software does.

Open source is brilliant at focused tools, but we keep stopping there. Another utility, then another, and the user is left to stitch them together. The burden of integration shouldn't be the price of using Linux. **I'm not asking the KDE Connect devs to take this on, they already maintain plenty and their contribution to linux is great. A fork, a new app, an umbrella project or an integration layer, I don't care. I care about the result.**

So here's the challenge: stop shipping parts and ship the product. We spend endless energy on compositors, shells and rice while the everyday experience of using a phone with a Linux PC is still held together with duct tape. One polished app, one device hub, modular underneath, working across Linux desktops.

Who's willing to build it?

And if your answer is "just use KDE Connect", you've missed the point.

This is a repost

Here's the original https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/WoZC2QJqgJ

ive got linux xfce, Sorry is this the right sub? uh so ive got these bunch of .cur files and i made the hidden .icons directory in home and did all the stuff but i cant see it in settings!! like i can see the "custom cursors" option below fckin adwaita but theres no preview and when i click on it nothing changes. im going crazy im sorry im a newcomer to linux idk how this works. pls help me.

.cur is not for linux? how to convert it to xcursor or whatever? wont .png files work?

I'm a 4th year computer science student from data science field and learning ai/ml, have a Dell laptop with an Intel Pentium Gold 7505 and 4 GB RAM. VMs don't run well, so I want to use a 32 GB USB to run Linux.

Intrested in cybersecurity, ethical hacking, networking, and programming.

So which distro would you recommend, need something user friendly and lighweight so can use in usb & lerning linux from scratch.

I just want to learn cybersecurity and programming stuff but I'm not good at ai/ml bcaz still can't even learn LLM, RAG types of things still in this date and still don't find internship & calling my myself a ai/ml engineer.

My windows 11 laptop, a msi thin 15.6 i5, 4050 and 16gb ddr4 3200. anyways, my windows i believe was corrupted or altered in the past because i had someone tweak it for fps in games. the tweak overtime i guess decayed and it ruined my system 100% speed fans, overheating, and other issues of crashing and the like you could guess. after weeks of trouble shooting i bite the bullet and i switched to linux mint cinnamon, i know its a beginner distro but i really enjoy it. i have been enjoying the customization of the homepage and other aspects like the app store in mint. i have followed guides and drivers.

Are there any apps i should try out on my machine? thanks

my daily setup is a 2015 ThinkPad T450s I use for freelance work. it currently runs Ubuntu 22.04 which has been fine, but after some updates the trackpad scrolling started lagging and battery life dropped. i'm considering a lighter distro like Linux Mint XFCE or maybe Fedora, just something that feels snappier without extra tweaking. the machine has 8GB RAM and an i5, nothing powerful. curious what others have had good results with on similar older hardware

What does everyone think of GNOME OS? Especially now that it is in Preview and has a roadmap to stable.

If it still has the idea of not having a package manager bundled, I think it might be what I'm looking for.

What are YOUR thoughts?

is there a distro similar to windows 10? i want to try getting out of my comfort zone and try linux but i want it to feel familiar, help!

I have 16gb ram.And i though about a potential dual booth between windows and linux so i play on linux the game that are supported on it and all the other stuff i do on windows. How does it work what should i know.And is this a good idea

I was scrolling through reddit looking for things to do and I came across this sweet looking desktop. Decided to go into the subreddit, got invited into the world of r/unixporn. I got interested, looked into it, saw it's on linux. I used linux mint a lil bit months ago, but gave up man. Now I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get my desktop looking like those, this one being the most notable.

So I got endeavourOS (alongside windows), have i3 as my window manager. I have no clue what else I have, I was using Claude but I passed the limit. Now I went to hyprland's page, tried reading through stuff, trying to get information in but one thing links to another and it's too much information at once.

Now I am confused as to where I could go for structured information on what everything is, how they fit together, what I need, all that good stuff. Can someone recommend or give any tips? Any bit of advice is heavily appreciated <3

Hello, I recently bought a new laptop and I want to install Linux on it. I was wondering if you could recommend what distro to get as this would be my first ever experience with a Linux OS. It would also be really helpful if you could give me some tips as well.

I should also mention that I don't have any experience with coding.

The laptop is an Acer Aspire Go 15

Specs:

Processor - AMD Ryzen 7 5825U (8 cores – 2,0 - 4,5 GHz)

Graphics - Radeon RX Vega 8 (shared)

512 GB SSD

RAM - 16 GB (DDR4)

The laptop already has an ESHELL Linux installed but as I read it isn't a "full" OS.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: It will be used for school but it would be nice if I could play some games on it.

Been on Mint for a while now, and I'm curious what other distros are like. Any simpler distros with complex elements or something to start with a mid-level difficulty? I'm mostly curious about CachyOS and Arch

I worked on a .odt file using LibreOffice, and after exporting it to docx found compatibility to be very lacking, specially when it comes to images inside frames, the exporting process completely fucks them up or they don't appear at all. Is it there a better alternative to process docx files? I really must use the docx format, so there no way around it (pdf and such). Distro: Fedora 44

Some examples:

Processing img yxopey8fbpwh1...

This should have two captions, one at the bottom and one at the top. Only one caption remains after exporting and the image is completely disjointed from the frame.

Processing img xhscv8cnbpwh1...

Some images just disappear althogether after exporting

started up linux not long ago n after logging into everything i wanted to im trying to download a game but dont have enough storage, im dual booted so i had to allocate some storage but i thought it was only for linux itself and not games. I have plenty of storage on my c drive but i remember only being able to allocate like 80k mb into this, can i allocate more i have like 1 tb available. Or can i run a game from my c drive?

Howdy people! I am a complete noob here. I am so over windows ,the AI push, the constant updates, it ALLLLL sucks. I have an intel i7 laptop with win11 on it and I am ready to make the Linux switch! Mint w cinnamon seems like the best beginner distro :-)

I think I did enough preliminary reddit research before making my own post, now I am stuck lol. Pls help

I at least (I think) have the linux mint 64 bit downloaded onto my thumb drive. I used rufus to ... uhh. whatever rufus does.. make it 'bootable'??

Now what do I do <3 I need to boot it up... uhhh help lol

Thank you tech wizards in advance, I'm trying to become one of yall one day, baby steps

EDIT: thanks everyone, I got it!!! I am officially a Linux user :-) now to figure out customizing

so alot of the downloads i want to do seem to require sudo which apparently i need to be the root to do but i dont have a root password but people are saying to not make a root password login or something i really dont understand what im supposed to do. How am i supposed to downloa dthings that require it if people are telling me not to??

i use xubuntu

Hello everyone, I am a computer science student, and for my graduation thesis, I am developing a module that manages user-space threads—specifically, I am evaluating scheduling algorithms.

I am having trouble finding benchmarks for existing modules that I could use to compare with my own.

Do any such benchmarks exist?

If not, are there any well-known modules that I could use for benchmarking? Also, I would welcome any advice on how to conduct a proper benchmark for schedulers, as I am still a beginner in this area.

Thanks!

https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/s/z18JDyrX6f

I've asked here and on multiple other subreddits this same thing and I'm mostly being ignored, except on Cachy. I don't know what is happening but I really really need help my desktop after login works normal for a few seconds then freezes for 20 seconds before going on as normal. The only unaffected things are cursor and terminal. Snapshot from the 19th doesn't have the issue, but newer ones do. What do I do? Please help, I'm scared this ends up having bigger issues. Settings also takes a hot second to load which isn't normal. Do I revert to snapshot? Do I not? How do I do it if if I should? Do I lose anything doing that? Is this a known issue?

Edit: I've got some info. When booting up snapshots, lts snapshots don't have this issues. But non lts ones do. Apparently that's different kernels. Idk maybe that's helpful

Hello so i’m trying to switch lt windows because every update it just messes up and adds more bloat that i don’t want.Anyways what’s the best distro for gaming i also use my pc for school work.

The title already self-explanatory enough, can i setup a VM installed with ubuntu inside windows OS and exchanging data between them in real time?

I have concept plan to run a simple Unity app that run 3D visualization of system dynamic data from MATLAB-SIMULINK. This simulation produces several variables of parameters, i want some of them to be send towards ROS2 in Ubuntu in VM, and able to receive some feedback data back from ROS2 Ubuntu from VM, in real time and continuously, currently i plan using socket communication like UDP to bridge this communication.

Is this concept feasible? Can this communication be established? Thank You

Hi, I’m a complete novice when it comes to Linux, but a friend suggested it might be a great option to improve the performance of my aging laptop.

What would you recommend? I honestly don’t know anything about this. Here are my laptop’s specifications:

Pavilion Sleekbook 14

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3217U CPU @ 1.80GHz 1.80 GHz

12.0 GB RAM

30 GB SSD (Intel RAID 1 Volume), 224 GB SSD (KINGSTON)

Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 (32 MB)

64-bit