an owncloud client for kde plasma

ownCloud offers a Free software solution to synchronize your files across different devices. I’ve been working on a KDE Plasma client for this server technology. In this article, after giving a bit of background of the problem, I explain the design concepts behind the new ownCloud Plasma client and demonstrate how it works and integrates with different Plasma workspaces.

I’ve been looking for a good solution to synchronize my data across different devices I use forever. The need arose when I got my first laptop (next to my desktop machine): I wanted to be able to work on my projects on both devices without having to manually copy files between the machines. It turned out to be actually quite a hard problem: Sure, you can work on your stuff on a remote machine, and thereby always work on one version of a certain file. But what happens when you’re offline? I needed files to be synched, and was looking for a more or less automated that worked both offline and online. I took a look at the Coda Filesystem, which seemed to solve this problem well, for others at least. It was a bit of a pain to set up (and understand how it exactly worked), but after a bit of fiddling, I had copies of my stuff on different machines. It seemed to work initially, but later turned out to be a little bit too brittle for my use cases (I don’t quite recall the details, but eventually, I gave up on it because it meant more or less constant maintenance, and still it wasn’t quite as bullet proof as I had hoped it would be.

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