On 4/23/25 3:37 PM, Jim via tde-users wrote:
That seems like overkill. Why not just start up the file manager of one of the other DEs, access the camera, and then kill that file manager?
There is an old adage that old dogs can't learn new tricks. That proverb is misleading. Old dogs can learn new tricks. They just prefer not to.
Statler and Waldorf might comment about my intelligence too.
From within TDE I launched KDE Dolphin. I have overconfigured the Dolphin "Places" panel because no "Devices" appeared.
From within TDE I launched Xfce Thunar. In the navigation panel was a "Devices->Android" option. Selecting /Internal Storage/photos/ showed no files but selecting /Internal Storage/DCIM/100KAIOS/ found a fresh photo. That latter file path and method is the same as when I connect my Canon PowerShot camera with a USB cable.
From within TDE I launched KDE Konqueror, which I seldom use and haven't done any overconfiguring like KDE Dolphin. KDE Konqueror showed a "Remote->MTP Devices" option but nothing appeared there.
I returned to KDE Dolphin and tinkered until I could display Devices. Like Thunar, an "Android" device appeared but selecting that option resulted in an error message that no such device existed. Oddly the full device file path was in the error message.
I toggled to a different console and logged in as a different user with KDE. From within KDE both Dolphin and KDE Konqueror allowed me to browse the phone with no problems. The Location bar in both showed "mtp:" but since TDE does not support MTP I guess that point is moot.
Similarly with logging in with Xfce. In addition to Thunar readily recognizing the device, an "Android" icon appeared on the desktop.
Launching KDE Dolphin and Konqueror from within TDE seems to indicate the tools see a device but fail to show anything because some kind of handshake or process notification is missing from the full KDE environment. Possibly playing with some KDE environment variables might help use those tools within TDE, but probably not worth my time since Xfce Thunar recognizes the device with no fuss.
As Oddball (Kelly's Heroes) might say, "Woof, woof." Old dogs can learn new tricks.
I guess that raises the question of whether there is a wish list item in the bug tracker to add MTP support. I did not find any such issue but I'm not clever with that gitea interface.