You can control your Linux PC from your Android phone – here’s how

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• KDE Connect allows you to do many things.
• With this remote app, you can send commands to Linux.
• There's no limit to what you can do with this feature.

Smartphones and desktop/laptop connections have been helping people for years. A lot of times, it's nothing more than keeping things in sync. You might want to keep your contacts manageable in both places. You might want/need to transfer files from on to the other (and/or vice versa).

Smartphone-to-PC connections have been helping people for years. Many times, the benefit is nothing more than keeping things in sync. Perhaps you want to keep your contacts manageable in both places. Or you might need to transfer files from one device to the other.

Also: 3 ways to switch Linux distros without losing all your data

Or maybe — you want to control your Linux desktop from your Android phone. All the cool kids are doing it, and I'm going to show you how it's done. 

What can you do with this feature?

Using the KDE Connect app on your Android device and the KDE Connect app on your desktop, you can send commands from your phone to do certain things.

For example, you may have stepped away from your computer and realized you forgot to lock it. Or maybe you need to shut down the computer, open an app, print something, or play a media file. In fact, what you can do is limited only by your imagination.

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KDE Connect can come in very handy. Let me show you how to create your first commands to control your Linux PC from Android.

Creating your first command

What you'll need: The only things you'll need for this are KDE Connect installed on both your Android phone and your desktop. Do be aware that, if you don't use the KDE Plasma desktop, installing KDE Connect will also install a ton of dependencies.

You can find the Android app in the Google Play Store.

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Let's say you want to create a command that will lock your desktop screen. To do that, type something like “lock screen” as the name, and then type loginctl lock-session for the command.

When finished, click Add, and you're done.

Using your new command

Using your newly created command is easy. Open KDE Connect on your phone, tap Run Command, then tap the command you just created from the list. You should notice that your desktop immediately locks.

Cool, eh?

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Other commands you might add include:

• Shutdown – systemctl poweroff
• Reboot – systemctl reboot
• Suspend – systemctl suspend
• Unlock screen – loginctl unlock-screen

Here's a seriously fun command to add. You can create a command that takes a screenshot of your desktop and automatically sends it to your phone. That command might be named screen to phone, and the command would be:

file=/tmp/$(hostname)_$(date “+%Y%m%d_%H%M%S”).png; spectacle -bo “${file}” && while ! [ -f “${file}” ]; do sleep 0.5; done && kdeconnect-cli -d $(kdeconnect-cli -a –id-only) –share “${file}”

The command above depends on the Spectacle screenshot tool. If you don't have Spectacle installed, you can either install it or adjust the command so that it can be used on your desktop.

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KDE Connect is a really handy tool for controlling your Linux machine remotely. I would highly recommend you give this app a try and come up with some helpful commands to add.