In Gnome, you need GSConnect.

On the device, you need KDE Connect.

GSConnect

GSConnect is a Gnome Extension. If you have not already started using Gnome Extensions, read this. Long story shory: you can easily enable Gnome Extensions from a web browser, and that’s super handy. In this case, you’ll want to enable GSConnect. It’ll look like this:

Wow look at all my browser tabs. Cool, right? (Can you still trust me, now that you know?)

Nothing will look immediately different. You will, however, notice when you pull down the top right:

“Mobile Devices” now appears. (And look at all that stuff you know about my laptop now! Wow!) At this point (prior to installing KDE Connect on your phone / device), turning it on will do nothing of consequence, but you should turn it on, so that you can connect when we get KDE Connect running for you. So let’s move on to installing on your phone.

KDE Connect

Play Store / search KDE Connect / install.

Open KDE Connect.

It will discover the name of the machine running GSConnect. Click connect.

Over in the Gnome Environment, you should get a notification that something is trying to connect. You should accept this.

(When I first tried, I had a problem with the notification. It would disappear almost instantly, before I could accept. I found this page about the problem. But then I can’t remember what I did to fix it. Sorry.) ((I might have reinstalled or something simple like that. Shrug. I wasn’t expecting to write this article, but then my wife wanted to connect her Android phone to her Dell XPS 13, and I realised this is a good topic to write about. But alas, I hadn’t taken notes on my experience…. Live and learn, am-i-right?))

Once Connected

Check this out:

(Guess what kind of cheap phone I have?) And look at all the stuff you can now do. This is pretty powerful business. You’ll need to grant permission for Gnome to do stuff to and on the phone, and vice versa. All quite self-explanatory.

You can set things up so that, when connected, phone notifications will show up in your Gnome notifications area. You can also use the phone screen to move the mouse on your computer, which is fun so show off at parties (but I can’t find any other reason for this function, and, yes, I attend strange parties).

I’ll note: if you connect to “Messaging”, you’ll be connecting to the default SMS service on your phone. For example, I’ve been using Signal, and nothing I sent after I switched showed up on Messaging. AND (!) all my deleted messages showed up as well. (This is worth a second article some day….)

That’s it.

Now go.

Enjoy.

For technical reasons, there are a few laptops out there that actually can’t run Linux; it’s to do with how their hard drives are configured; it’s to do with RAID, and your eyes are already glazing over. Fair enough.

Your best bet is to use a popular search engine and enter a term along the lines of “[some random laptop] linux”. There will be information about someone out there in the world who has tried Linux on this machine. It’s a big world; you will not be the first to wonder.

The big players these days (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and so on) have all the drivers you can imagine bundled up in their distributions. Generally, you’ll never have to install a driver; that’s a problem of the past — and it was a hell of a problem when it was a problem, back in the day.

A good idea is to try running Linux from a USB stick (or some other medium) and see that everything works. For example, Ubuntu offers instructions for creating a bootable medium and going for a test drive. I won’t reinvent the wheel they invented, but the basics are: download a thing, write that thing to a medium that is bootable, boot from that medium, have fun!

If you’re trying to see whether Linux will run on an old laptop, then you might want to try a minimal “Live Linux”. There are several options, with the most popular teeny tiny Linux being Puppy. (It can be good fun to just hack around with tiny distributions if you want to learn some of the basics and some of the non-mainstream software options.)

Assuming that everything is working from the live distribution, use whatever graphical installer they offer and go for it!

If you want to, you can install Linux along side some other operating system, like Windows. To do so, you’ll need to create partitions — scary! But the installer will help you along, and again, assuming you’re following along with someone who has done this before on your laptop of choice, you’ll have a model to follow. In a case like this, you’ll be creating a “dual boot” system, and the world is full of instructions of how to set this up. (I can’t really help because I’ve never done this because Windows: yuck.)

Long story short: yes you can run Linux on your laptop, with very few exceptions. And these days, installation is as easy as booting from a removeable drive and following basic instructions.

Have a go. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom.

However, if you want to run a full-featured desktop environment, like Gnome, with a lot of software, like Microsoft Teams, then you’ll want to go big. 16GB will get you there.

What is a desktop environment you wonder? It’s the window configuration that you use to interact with the operating system. (That sounds overly technical.) It’s the menu, it’s what the title bars look like, it’s what happens when you double click, right click, move or stack one window on top of another. And so on.

In the world of Linux, you can choose what kind of desktop environment you want. I use Gnome, because it has lots of features, such as integration of my calendars, support for screen gestures, and so forth. But Gnome might be overkill.

Let’s say you’re setting up a laptop for a student. You might try Xfce as a desktop environment. It has a much smaller memory footprint than Gnome, and it looks more or less like a familiar old Microsoft Windows environment. (Obviously, under the hood it operates entirely differently, but to anyone familiar with a Microsoft-style environment, the jump to Xfce isn’t huge.)

Generally, I can get Gnome running nicely using about 2GB of RAM. Xfce will be less (I don’t have a number off the top of my head), but you’ll still be using at least 1GB just to get the machine running.

You can save memory by shutting down services enabled by default, assuming you don’t use them. For example, I do not use the snapd service, which you can think of as a “Play Store” or something along those lines. So, I removed the snapd package from Ubuntu and saved myself a heap of memory.

Most of my work is browser-based, so I did a lot of experimenting with browsers. I’m using Ubuntu 21.04 currently (I prefer at this point in my life to install a full-featured system and pare it down, rather than build up the system I want from a simpler base (I’m looking at you Arch Linux).)

Firefox is the default browser in Ubuntu, and I like it very much. But for a bunch of my work, my employers developed Chrome extensions. Good news, there are two ways to run Chrome in Linux.

First, you can run Google’s version of Chrome, downloadable from their site.

Second, you can run Linux’s own Chromium, which is, more or less, Chrome without all the Google stuff attached to it. Chromium will run extensions from the Chrome store, so I had two choices.

Ultimately — and the purists will despise this — I chose Google’s Chrome. Ultimately, it came down to memory management. Chromium, I found, used a massive amount of memory for its password store, whereas, unexpectedly, Chrome did not. (Could I have rooted around under the hood and made Chromium stop doing that? Probably. Was it worth my time? No.)

In the end, even though Chrome gets called out as spyware in various corners of the internet, I’m so deep in with Google by now that I can’t see wasting my time on privacy purity. For example, whatever browser I use, I’ll have a gmail tab open. I have an Android phone. I search with Google. Yes. Yes, they have absorbed me. I am no longer pure.

The good news for the impure is that all of this stuff runs perfectly fine in Linux.

My employers use Microsoft Teams. I installed the native Linux app, and promptly uninstalled it. Perhaps it has features I’ll want to use in the future, but right now, for the job I’m doing, the browser supports everything I need. The Teams app consumes an incredible amount of resources, and installs a ppa (reference to a software repository) to keep itself up to date, and sets itself up to run absolutely constantly. Bugger that. Not interested.

(If you stick with me long enough, you’ll find that I have no use for anything Microsoft. As a writer, for example, I utterly despise Word. I think the window environment is rubbish. And I can’t understand why they don’t provide simple software to do the simplest of things. In short, I’ve never used Windows except in workplaces where I’ve been assigned a machine. But I digress. This is about memory.)

Let’s talk hard drive space. My laptop has 256GB, and that’s more than ample at this point in my life. I store all my media on a separate server. Documents and the like are all in the cloud. And a basic install of Ubuntu took less that 10GB.

If you have a need to store a lot of big files locally, then by all means go big. But to simply run Linux, you don’t need much. Give it a try and enjoy!