Hi everyone,

I have a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 5G Smartphone. I'm not sure if this issue began (about 4 months ago) due to MX updates or if it was related to a Xiaomi update, but getting file transfers between the phone and Thunar to work is a friggen nightmare. I take a lot of business photos and I'm also a hobby photographer, so this issue effects me at least twice each and every week. Here's the low-down of what's going on:

1. I plug the phone into a USB 2.0 port on my MX 21 system
2. Phone displays options .... No action, photo transfer, file + data transfer, cancel
3. I select file + data transfer because if I select photos the link vanishes from Thunar.
(so I have no choice, only data transfer keeps the devices link in Thunar active)
4. Thunar attempts to mount the phone for a few seconds during which the phone menu options go away.
5. Thunar is not able to mount the phone, no error messages, device link in Thunar is still visible.
6. Start over with step 3.

Today was the worst of all. Sometimes I have to repeat these steps 4 or 5 times before the phone data finally becomes visible in Thunar. But today it was between 12 and 15 times of repeating these steps. This is incredibly annoying, especially because I never had this issue on my Asus Zenphone 3 or even with this phone during the first few months that I owned the phone.

Does anyone know of a phone app, similar to the iDevice mounter in settings, which works better than the default file manager / usb port access?

When I still used USB I usually had to switch on / allow data transfer via USB in the system settings. Maybe an update changed something there?

As to your question about the apps, I use KDE-Connect which works via WLAN. But this is of course in the KDE / Plasma desktop environment...

Thank you for your reply.
I may have found a solution.
Although I use Thunar as my default FM, last night I installed PcmanFM as well. So far I've tried accessing the phone 3 times and it's worked without a problem. Plug the phone into the USB ... a massage appears on the screen that the phone was recognized ... then select file & data transfer on the phone ... followed by clicking on the phone device symbol of pcmanFM ... and voila, Android phone data was immediately available.

So I placed a shortcut to the FM on my panel. Will continue using this during the next few days. I'll come back and mark this post as solved if the positive behavior continues to be consistent.
Greetings from Germany.

If the situation remains stable you might consider posting a bug notice at the thunar maintainers' site...

Sadly pcmanFM working was a fluke. When I tried it today it was just as buggy as with Thunar. Bummer ...

I may have found a working solution. Three tries so far, all without a hitch. There's an app in the MX Linux repository by the name of android-file-transfer. That appears to work like a charm. Simply plug the phone into the USB port. Select date & file transfer on the phone's screen, then wait apx. 5 to 10 seconds to ensure that android-file-transfer has had enough time to fully recognize the device. Only then open up the app on your computer with a click, and voila, your android directory structure appears on the screen.

The only "downside" (if that's what you want to call that) would be the fact that you can't do a single command for cutting/pasting whichever data you selected all in one shot. You can *COPY* one or many different files into a folder of your choice, followed by coming back to android-file-transfer and then deleting what you don't want anymore from the phone. Most people keep everything on their phones these days anyway, so for most people that won't be an issue. I haven't tried moving things to the phone yet, will try that in the next day or so and then report back.

Alright, I give up ....
Tried numerous different options with the Android File Transfer. It either works the first or second time around after selecting "Data or File Transfer" on the phone, followed by waiting about 10 minutes or so just to be safe ... or it doesn't work at all.

Android File Transfer does appear to work more consistently when you're willing to wait those 10 minutes which I just mentioned. It's also nice that it doesn't actually "mount" the device as per File Manager so you're never required to unmount it again when utilizing this option. The 10 minute wait doesn't bother me since the phone is automatically also charging during that time. So between the regular phone mount and the Android File Transfer, one of them appears to be working semi-reliably which is however not good enough to mark this thread as solved.

I do believe that this is strictly an MX Linux issue that the developers ought to spend more time on (if possible). I say this because my wife and I have identical phones. When she uses her phone on a new Linux Mint setup the camera mount always works for her as it should.

ALSO: I have experienced this camera mount or rather not mounting situation with Thunar, PCmanfm, and Caja. So again, I have to beleive that this is an MX Linux issue since the problem was duplicated on three different file managers.