Klaus Zimmermann's Corner

Sanest way I've found so far to transfer files from Android phone to Linux

Maybe it's just me, but for some mysterious reason, I find that transferring files out of my Android phone using a cable - or at least not without having to download an app, often proprietary, to "allow" me to do what should've been a no-brainer in first place. Maybe Google secretly doesn't want anyone having access to, you know, cheap massive storage like laptop drives so that they instead turn to cloud storage that they control?

Whatever the case, I've already tried standard file manager transfers, MTP mode switching, "transfer clients" and nothing seemed to work. And then I tried to wirelessly transfer them using my home wifi, using something like Ghost Commander. Also no goal: the phone keeps going to sleep and the OS blocks the process to "save battery" or something. This annoyance made me look for certain hacks such as showing a movie on endless repeat until the transfer was complete, but that was silly.

After so many frustrated trial and error attempts, I've finally settled on something that - even if not perfect - works for me. This is what I did to help myself:

The transfer will go on, and Primitive does not allow the phone to sleep while it runs in the foreground, which means you don't have to worry about keeping it awake.

And that's it. It's not in any way a perfect solution, and does require installing an app, but it's waaaaay less hassle than others and everything in this stack is Free Software (ok, minus Android). And that's what I've been doing to back up my pictures.

Do you know of any better way, something simpler or faster? More secure, perhaps? Let me know!