Hi everyone,

I currently use Telegram to send photos, PDFs and text messages between my Android phone and my Debian laptop. It works, but everything goes through a third-party server, and I would like a fully local, privacy-friendly alternative.

What I need: Send photos, PDFs and other files in both directions (phone ↔ laptop) Send short text messages or clipboard content Works locally

Thanks for any advice and experience!

  • The_greatest_ahole9@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 hours ago

    Honestly, I would probably recommend localsend. It’s a pretty good way of transferring files between multiple devices locally. Only downside is that you have to have the app running to transfer it. You can’t just open it on one device and share to another if it doesn’t have localsend open.

    Edit: Honestly though KDE connect is another great option too. Depending on your use case it could be even better than localsend.

  • AuroraShine@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 hours ago

    Peace be with you

    I have no experience with Ubuntu or Debian, but I think the old method is still the best:
    just use a good USB cable. USB 3.0 or higher is significantly faster for data transfer.
    fully local, no cloud, no server. 🙂

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
    8·
    18 hours ago

    KDE connect works well. You could also use something like nextcloud or SFTP and always on VPNs and whatnot. Not sure what your setup looks like.

  • sportsfork@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    12 hours ago

    cx explorer on android, both ways, it can act as ftp server, or sftp client. laptop can do both aswell, of course

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    13 hours ago

    Whilst I’m not sure if it covers everything, I’ve been playing around with a Nextcloud on my home server which is just visible to devices on my home network (i.e. so my phone has to be connected to WiFi at home to reach it).

    Since your laptop is Linux you can easilly run Nextcloud in it as a service.

      • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
        8·
        1 day ago

        Thank you guys. I’ve been using LocalSend for a year or so, and recently I noticed it’s Documents & Data is over 1 GB on my iPhone.

        To me, that means that there’s some cache you cannot remove (the only way to clear that on iOS is to remove the app: I have just tried that, and it solves the issue).

        I thought KDE Connect is more bloated. Turned out, it’s just 8 MB; and it has the ability to clear cache. All my computers are on Linux (Gnome or sway: perhaps that’s why I forgot about the KDE Connect), and I thought hey, really, why not!

        So, as someone who used LocalSend for a long time: it does the job, but KDE Connect is just better, it turned out.

        • MasterBlaster@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 hours ago

          with kde connect and gsconnect you can use Nautilus to browse files over sftp. faster than mtp if you have a hight speed wifi connection. you also get sometimes useful features of notifications, sms message access and sending.