What do you use to send and receive SMS on your computer? I’ve tried KDE Connect but found it too buggy to use daily.
I get my friends to install Signal instead.
My friends started getting rid of Signal when Signal dropped SMS support. As soon as it stopped being the default SMS application, it got uninstalled. Nice own goal.
Now Signal only lives on for me due to the signal-cli project. Once I can find a working google-messages cli setup to send and receive reports to/from a specific device , goodbye Signal 😿
My impression was that Signal dropped SMS integration because it was being used to trick users who really needed security into thinking they were having secure chats when they really weren’t. Given that enabling reliable secure chat is the reason for Signal’s existence, that was a pretty bad problem.
90+% of my mobile and desktop chat with real-world friends is via Signal. I use SMS with friends who don’t have modern phones, with relatives who are mentally impaired, and with businesses.
That was and is a legitimate concern, and I totally stand with their decision. But it could have been handled by making changes to the user interface, blue send button is encrypted , red send button is plain text. By removing sms support people who are unable to use multiple apps moved to other options.
Cannot get grandma to use three different communication apps.
Well it was the signal teams toy , we were just allowed to play with it. 🤷
Google Messages, any browser works.
There is also a Google messages application, that can be minimised to tray. It is just a browser wrapper, but at least saves you the hassle of opening and closing and logging in everytime.
I have Thunderbird opened constantly, so I just open Google Messages in one of the tabs in it. Only problem is that it does not show any notifications, but I get them through KDE Connect.
Sms, now that’s a word I didn’t hear for a long time
OK. But most of NA uses SMS instead of some Meta product to message with.
I’d rather use SMS than Whatsapp. I also use Signal and am open to use any open source alternative but most people don’t and aren’t so the thing we have in common is SMS.
What bugs are you encountering with KDE Connect?
Most of the time I can’t even send a message with it - I’ll type the message out, click send and… nothing. No indication of error, no indication of success. There’s also an issue with loading the message history right after launch. A lot of times it doesn’t work or only works partially. App on the phone has full permissions, set to unrestricted battery, etc.
Do you have a crapload of messages stored on your phone? It took a really long time to load my messages the first time, then it was usable
deleted by creator
Excluding KDE connect? I just don’t then…
Beeper bridges sms to matrix
I have signed up to Beeper’s waiting list. I hope I won’t have to wait too long…
I used Google Messages directly for a while, but then a Matrix bridge that uses Google Messages was released, so now I use that. If you want to try it, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy makes it really easy to self-host, but if you don’t want to do that, something like Beeper can probably do it.
Can it handle MMS, pictures, etc?
Yes, and also RCS.
There used to be a time where you could email [email protected]
no clue if that still works or even if that was an actual thing and not a fever dream
I use that for my NAS to “text” my phone if the power goes out and it shuts down gracefully on the UPS.
I don’t because I prefer to keep my ecosystems separate.
Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn’t support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.
Obviously, if you don’t trust Google this would be a non-starter though.
I use Pulse SMS. It has cross platform sybc for every major os, and has a decent feature set. Pretty sure its an electron app though.
MacOS does a nice job imo
MacOS does a nice job imo
This is not a macOS community, duh.
