KDE Connect 1.4

The long awaited KDE Connect release 1.4 was on Saturday, the 7th of December 2019 and it is dropping in distributions as I write this!

So why I’m I so excited about this release?!? The handy dandy SMS app, that’s why!

Many of my friends and even some family think I am living in the stone age and say “why on earth are you using SMS, when there is WhatsApp and Telegram etc?” and that is probably a valid point. But unfortunately, my bank has to abide by European legalisation and have been forced into complying with ’Strong Customer Authentication’ (SCA). This requires that the bank send me a 6 digit one time password via SMS to my phone which has to be entered when I make a payment online. This has proved to be a right pain in the backside because I live out in the countryside and can’t get a mobile signal very readily.

But with the new SMS app, I can position my phone in the upstairs window (where I get a very weak but usable signal, if I don’t touch it and point it in the right direction!) and send/recieve SMS’s directly on my Plasma desktop. This makes payments and login’s much, much easier!!

So I you are looking forward to the SMS App as much as myself, I strongly suggest you get over to your distro repositories and upgrade as soon as possible!

You can also compile it from source from the KDE download page – https://download.kde.org/stable/kdeconnect/1.4/

Happy SMS’ing everybody!