I get my friends to install Signal instead.

Sms, now that's a word I didn't hear for a long time

Google Messages, any browser works.

What bugs are you encountering with KDE Connect?

Beeper bridges sms to matrix

There are multiple ways to bridge SMS to XMPP. Works nicely in my experience.

If you are US or Canada based this is also worth a look: https://jmp.chat/

I used Google Messages directly for a while, but then a Matrix bridge that uses Google Messages was released, so now I use that. If you want to try it, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy makes it really easy to self-host, but if you don't want to do that, something like Beeper can probably do it.

There used to be a time where you could email PhoneNumber@carrier.com

no clue if that still works or even if that was an actual thing and not a fever dream

Most of my contacts are on Signal. So I tend to use Signal desktop. It's not the best desktop application but it works well for what I use it for.

When I'm at work I sometimes just use scrcpy over WiFi and leave my phone in my bag. That way I SMS but also all of the other apps.

I had a 3g modem in my cisco router that I used to use for that, but when they shut down the 3g network I was never able to find another cheap sms-only service for the 4g version of the cisco modem. (So I switched to wifi & xmpp.)

I wrote my own software to use it, talking to the raw modem interface. Which, interestingly, uses an extension of the old "AT" modem command set. Weird.

Being able to write shell scripts that access sms is fantastic, I miss it.

Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn't support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.

Obviously, if you don't trust Google this would be a non-starter though.

I just checked out Spacebar. Message did not deliver and phone call only opens dialer on the phone with the number entered.

I use Pulse SMS. It has cross platform sybc for every major os, and has a decent feature set. Pretty sure its an electron app though.

Pushbullet works great for exactly this