Switched to Linux a little over a year ago and it’s been great, but one thing eludes me. What’s the best way to do the following when you don’t use Windows or MacOS?

  1. Manage music collection - on Windows I used iTunes to sync my mp3’s to the phone. Is there a linux solution?

  2. Manage SMS from desktop - I’d like to be able to read and reply to SMS messages on my iPhone from the linux PC right in front of me instead of this rinky dink iPhone soft keyboard. Is this possible?

And how the hell does anyone but a child type on an iPhone anyway, while we’re at it? (rhetorical) Grrrr.

Thanks!

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    The solution for the music I’ve arrived at is based on OpenSubsonic.

    I’m running gonic (Navidrome works, too, and there are other servers such as the original Subsonic) on my server. I’m using Android, but there’s probably a similar iOS app, and the OSS Tempo app. Tempo can stream, but it’ll also let you download and cache music locally - including entire playlists. So I have a “Phone” playlist that I add music I want to sync to my phone (my music collection is 84GiB, so I sync only part of it), and occasionally download it. Tempo is smart enough to only download songs it doesn’t already have.

    This is only 1-way. There’s no facility to upload music to the server using OpenSubsonic. Also, caching only downloads; if I remove a song from the playlist, it stays on the phone. It’s not a true “sync”.

    I used to use SyncThing, but maintaining include/exclude lists was far more work.

    For SMS, I wrote a program. But it requires two different OSS apps on the phone, and I doubt they exist on iOS, they don’t sync messages received when the phone wasn’t connected, and while one runs reliably, I have to keep restarting the second (it doesn’t persist well). So it’s not really a good solution, for many reasons, but I can’t bring myself to do mobile development anymore so unless an alternative that does what both SMS to URL Forwarder and RestSMS do all in one app, and include caching unsynced messages, it’s not likely to improve. It’s enough that I can respond to SMSes from my computer, which is the big thing.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        You’re welcome.

        For SMS, someone else touched on KDE Connect, which seems to be a pretty well-rounded solution. I can’t speak first-hand, as I don’t use KDE, but there’s a poorly maintained non-KDE program using the same protocol called mconnect, and from looking at that you get bidirectional SMS & file transfer, browsing your phone like a directory, shared clipboard and notifications, and remote control of your desktop media player from your phone. It does almost everything you might want (except for auto-syncing music a-la iTunes).