@penguin42 You over-estimate my technical prowess ... I understood most of the words in that, but honestly didn't understand any of it.

My experience is that working with me on things like this is an exercise in frustration, because people describe things to me in clear terms, and the processes fail in ways they cannot understand and say are not possible.

For this problem I've tried several things, and always there's a step in the middle where what they describe has no matching to what I'm seeing.

So ...

I'd love to get this working, but I don't know how to proceed.

@ColinTheMathmo If things failed in possible ways then that would be too easy and there would be no work for computer people. And anyway, somewhere between Turing, Church and Godel we know we can never know just how much the computer wants to confuse you.

@ColinTheMathmo So with KDEConnect and GSConnect installed on the phone and the laptop, do they see each other - i.e. does KDEConnect or GSConnect say it can see the phone?

@penguin42 Specifically, I installed GSConnect on the phone, and tried to install it on my laptop. Some things say it exists, but no command line command seems to exist to invoke it.

I've uninstalled things from my phone ... I have no idea now what may or may not be installed on the laptop ...

@penguin42 And when I had GSConnect on the phone, and followed the instructions for installing it on the laptop, the laptopn installation seemed to succeed, but I could apparently never run it, and GSConnect on the phone never reported seeing anything to connect to.

@ColinTheMathmo
Now I'll own up to not having tried it myself; but have you seen:

https://github.com/GSConnect/gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect/wiki/Help

I'd have to guess Firewall is probably the biggest likelihood problem.

@penguin42 What firewall? Where?

Also:

$ gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect
gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect: command not found

This despite following all the instructions for apparently installing GSConnect, and it all apparently succeeding.

@ColinTheMathmo Firewall on your PC that *may* stop connections; but hang on - gsconnect is a *graphical* extension to the Gnome graphical shell; I wouldn't expect it to provide any command line; I'd expect it to show up in thesettings page on Gnome (and file manager if that bit is installed)

@penguin42 OK, so I've hit the "Command" key, typed "Extensions" and a thing shows up.

I seem to have paired the phone and the laptop, and I can transfer one file at a time using the interface on the phone.

But I can't select a collection of files and transfer them all, and it's completely opaque as to how I might see the phone as a filesystem from the laptop.

I going to have to give up for the night. It's late, and I have work tomorrow.

If I can, I'll document carefully a process that I go through that confuses me so people can tell me where and why I'm being stupid.

But for now, I'm going to have to sign off.

Thank you ...

@ColinTheMathmo Great so if it's paired the impossible parts should be fine. If I understand correctly, on Gnome, you should be able to install the plugin for the filemanager nautilus; depending how you installed GSConnect that might be a separate thing to install or it might already be there. If it's working then can you see the directory in Nautilus - whenever, no rush.