10 Oct 2022, 00:13 by gary@extremeground.com:
I've had the kdeconnect app on my desktop and on my Samsung phone for at least a couple of years without ever having them able to see each other. Yesterday evening I was looking at the notices on my phone and saw that kdeconnect had found my desktop computer! It couldn't connect to it, but when I used my desktop to initiate the pairing, it worked.
To be clear, all I've been doing is the normal updates (Debian/Bookworm & the Android phone) and haven't even looked at kdeconnect since my initial failure to get it to work.
My home networking hasn't changed either. In fact it's been weeks since I even logged into the router.
I'm not sure why it suddenly started working the way everyone said it should when I first tried it, but kudos to the developers for whatever they did to fix the problem I was having.
Is it possible that your firewall reconfigured under the hood? If they couldn't see each other, that suggests a firewall blockage. Port Authority (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aaronjwood.portauthority/) can tell you whether your computer is even discoverable. If it's not there, then that's the first place to go troubleshooting.
If your Samsung (I'll try not to hold it against you) can find your computer's open KDEConnect port, then troubleshooting should focus on the KDEConnect settings in your Samsung (Ugh. I can feel another black mark on my soul). Some services need fiddling before you can use them. Others, like those that rely on Akonadi, don't work at all.
Did I mention that I don't care for Samsung?