GNOME Shell Extension Pre-release

[andyholmes]

After some consideration, I've decided to open the repository for Valent's companion GNOME Shell extension to the public.

Be warned, this extension has different goals than GSConnect and does not try to be a user interface for Valent. It's sole purpose is to integrate better into GNOME Shell, improving support for:

• Clipboard (especially on Wayland)
• Notifications
• Session Manager (e.g. lock/unlock)

As with Valent, the GNOME Shell extension has nightly builds available in Zip format that can be installed with the gnome-extensions tool or another method. There is a thread tracking breaking changes in the pre-release, although updating the extension at the same time as Valent should be enough.

Have fun!

[Baraccc]

Everyone loves screenshots 🫣

[andyholmes]

The UI for the extension is pretty minimal :)

[edgar-vincent]

Is it preferable to use this on a laptop running Gnome Shell in lieu of gsconnect when using valent on a Pinephone?
Sorry if my question is silly. I use both an Android phone (with KDEConnect) and a Pinephone (with valent) and would like to find the best setup.

[andyholmes]

That's okay, it's good question.

Overall Valent is probably less complete but has a newer code base (GTK4, libadwaita, etc). It also has a much more complete test suite, so there's more confidence that things won't explode or break between GNOME releases, but GSConnect has years more real-world testing and thousands of users running it.

The GSConnect Shell extension has a full menu of actions and keyboard shortcuts; Valent's will only ever be a little indicator. Otherwise the features should be the same, but again, newer code base in Valent.

In terms of the service, I have more confidence in Valent although some features are definitely not complete. In particular, the SMS/MMS support is very incomplete, but the PinePhone-side support for that is non-existent so maybe that doesn't matter to you. A few things are more complete in Valent, some are internal that you may not notice. Others like switching audio output (from Android app) and the lock/unlock plugin is supported.

In general I guess GSConnect is still probably the safer bet, but I have not plans to return to that project so without contributions from community members...it is what it is.

[edgar-vincent]

Thanks a lot for your reply.
I would in fact like to be able to send and receive my Pinephone SMS from my laptop, so I'm glad that you mentioned the fact that SMS support is non-existent; saves me from looking for them :)

[andyholmes]

Yes, that may take awhile. I haven't had a good look into what GNOME Calls supports and there's definitely no cross-desktop interface for that yet.

It's not something I'll put off forever, but my focus is mostly on getting libvalent and the plugin API stable, since ABI/API compatibility is a thing for this project (unlike GSConnect).