Valent Status and Overview

[andyholmes]

👋 Welcome to the Valent project!

Valent is a very functional KDE Connect client, with a pretty good test suite, but is still under heavy development. Issues are now open, but there are no guarantees for when they may be addressed.

Feature requests, suggestions and support requests should be posted to here in the Discussions board. Issues are intended for reporting problems and anything misfiled there will be moved to a new discussion.

The project is also open for contributions, but if your contribution involves a non-trivial amount of work, please open a discussion so that your work does not conflict with other planned changes.

FAQ

Q: Does Valent replace GSConnect?

If you are looking for a stable KDE Connect client, I would recommend KDE Connect. Although I no longer develop or use it myself, GSConnect is also probably more stable, and the project continues under a community-driven model.

Valent has a newer codebase and better tests than GSConnect, but very little real world testing and no stable releases.

Q: Does Valent support X?

Valent is a KDE Connect client and only supports features available in the reference implementation (i.e. kdeconnect-android and kdeconnect-kde). Phone calls, screensharing and anything else not supported by KDE Connect is not supported by Valent.

It's possible for these features to be implemented as third-party plugins, but Valent will never include features that break or extend the KDE Connect protocol. Any new features should be discussed upstream, with the KDE Connect team, where we can all collaborate on protocols that work for everyone.

Q: Valent for non-GNOME environments?

The majority of Valent is written with the core GObject libraries, although there are several plugin interfaces (and plugins that use them) which depend on GTK4 and libadwaita. The means that Valent is effectively a graphical GNOME application.

It may be possible to accommodate third-party developers that wish to use libvalent to write a client that integrates into other desktops or works in a headless environment. However, this will require volunteers willing to contribute time and energy, as I otherwise have little interest in these use cases.

What Else?

Until the project stabilizes enough to start thinking about release candidates, feel free to use this space to...

• Ask questions about the goals and future of Valent
• Share your experience and get help with problems
• Share your ideas and mock-ups

To get involved, start a New Discussion!

[andyholmes]

Here's a few screenshots, for those that are into those kind of things. This doesn't cover everything, but should give a decent idea of how the application looks in practice.

Main Page / Application Preferences

Device Page (with Connectivity Report) / Presentation Remote

Device Preferences / Battery Plugin Preferences

[andyholmes]

New feature! 🙂

I've added a media remote, like the one found in KDE Connect Android. It seems to work pretty well, although there are still a few impedance issues to work out.

Most (all?) MPRIS players seem to be uncompliant in at least one way, on top of the fact that Android media players are not MPRIS players but mapped to MPRIS functionality via KDE Connect's JSON protocol. KDE Connect Android also doesn't seem to support a few things like uploading album art or receiving relative "seek" commands.

If this is a useful feature to you, feel free to start a dedicated discussion with mockups, strange behaviour or suggestions 🙂

[000exploit]

Can it create multiple MPRIS players, or at least switch them more often so, for example, when Spotify is playing on another device, don't have control over NewPipe?

[andyholmes]

Multiple players should be exported if not running in a Flatpak, otherwise it should export the player that has most recently been in a "Play" state.

[000exploit]

Is this flatpak limitation?

[andyholmes]

Flatpak doesn't prevent Valent from requesting the permission, if that's what you mean.