The honest answer is because I prefer making my own thing for my own exact problem over trying to make someone’s else tool do or behave in a way that it is not designed or made for, it is a bit philosophical for me but yeah, I am not willing to put all the effort into something that I see is solving a problem and making compromises and ignoring things in ways I don’t agree with, not to mention the UI/UX disagreements I have, if localsend was my thing, it would have been very different from what we have right now.

And also I am doing it in spite, this thing have been bugging me for years and no one is willing to put the time and effort to do it the way I think it should be done so I am doing it myself…

In my honest opinion? Nothing. There is nothing worth changing here, all the other advice is just different kinds of extreme.

based on your selection and the fact that you asked this question is good a indicator that any other alternative people would suggest won’t do you that much benefit while carrying a much higher chance of being highly inconvenient.

Unfortunately it doesn’t, Localsend relies on a WiFi hotspot or AP to transfer files, what I am trying to build uses WiFi Direct (aka WiFi P2P), these two are not interchangeable nor interoperable.

you are right, linux does support wifi aware although the problem is that afaik Wi-Fi chipset and driver support is still lacking behind so most people can’t really create aware networks (I just tried on my machine, I can’t)

idk about other distros but on ubuntu I can’t send or receive files using Bluetooth without a 3rd party tool (unless there is a pre installed cli tool that I am not aware of:)

but anyway, if the transfer speed doesn’t bother you or isn’t a deal breaker for you then fair enough… have a nice day.

Well, I guess I would need to add an option in the app to share clipboard content.

You know what? You just gave me an idea, a very good idea. Sometimes there are things that are not in file managers, maybe in a particular app, maybe in a browser, and you just want to drag and drop it. I don’t like the idea of opening the app, right-clicking on the corners of the window just to enable “keep this app on the top” so that you can drag and drop whatever you want.

Instead, what I would like to see is a keyboard shortcut where a small window opens that stays on top of all the other windows. That you can drag and drop anything to it, or maybe copy-paste anything into it. Maybe a photo, maybe a video, maybe anything. This would work for clipboard content, for video files from other apps that are not file managers.

Well, it is far from complete and far from usable right now, so right now it is not better. But when it is done it will be because of two things:

1. Wi-Fi direct, instead of using the local network. Wi-Fi direct is P2P, which potentially will make the transfer much faster and the whole thing of setting up a hotspot or requiring the two device being connected to the same network won’t be necessary.
2. Deep integration with file managers and desktop environments

Bluetooth is slow as hell

Yep I am aware of it but The thing is Linux doesn’t support it yet and most android phones still don’t support it yet unlike WiFi Direct, so until that day comes WiFi Direct it is

Sure thing!

Through 2 things:

1. The answer is partly in the name, but there is no magic involved. Direct Share uses Wi-Fi Direct (also known as Wi-Fi P2P), which bypasses the middleman and connects the two devices directly to each other, potentially increasing the file transfer speed. However, it is only as fast as the slowest networking stack of the two connected devices. This is in contrast to almost all other solutions (like localsend) that rely on the two devices being connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

2. The other thing is deep integration with most file managers and desktop environments. For me personally, I believe that you should not need to open an app to send a file to your other device. You should be able to simply right-click on any file on your system, and there should be an option that says “Send to”. It should not open the whole app. It should only open a mini window or a small window with only the necessary things you need to send the file, which is:

   1. Select the device you want to send to
   2. (Optionally) Click Send

That’s all.

Yes actually I have tried it and I use it to share text between my devices and receive notifications.

The file sharing feature though is unbearably slow.

you are right that it does make it look like nothing more than an idea but honestly that’s fine by me and maybe I should mention that p2p peer discovery works right now and yeah that’s might not be much but well… we all start somewhere, don’t we!

This painfully true

Yo other companies can you just pretend it is Apple who is doing it so that you will copy this and announce it next day?

I tired kdenlive, openshot, shotcut, and some other one that’s very old looking that I forgot it’s name a few weeks ago (again) and kdenlive was by far the least frustrating one to use for me and the best looking one (imo), can’t really recommend anything other than it.

This is so cool, thanks

Now this was an interesting read, thanks (I will probably invest an hour or so in some video tutorials)