nitrokey-documentation icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
nitrokey-documentation copied to clipboard

suggest use of Kleopatra for gui method to create and manage gpg keys instead of GPA

Open kevin0t opened this issue 10 months ago • 3 comments

File: [components/nitrokeys/features/openpgp-card/openpgp-keygen-gpa.rst] https://docs.nitrokey.com/components/nitrokeys/features/openpgp-card/openpgp-keygen-gpa.html

I would suggest to recommend users to use kleopatra as a gui replacement for GPA. GPA seems to hardly have much development ,and the last stable binary most distro ships is 0.10.0 which was released 6years ago. I haven't checked on with the windows version as its bundled with gpg4win , but it probably shipping the older versions too.

Kleopatra is more actively developed (by kde) and supports smartcard functions along with a better ui and user experience.

Also if kleopatra is installed through flatpak it brings its own version of gpg , which is updated and more recent version of gpg , making things more secure.

Also for some reason GPA program does not recognise my nk3 and gives "card appplication not supported" wherease works perfectly with kleopatra.

making a guide with kleopatra shouldn't take much time too.

kevin0t avatar Mar 20 '25 19:03 kevin0t

You are right that GPA is quite dead and there are likely better alternatives. Personally I don't have recent experience with Kleopatra. If you would send a pull request with such changes, that would be appreciated.

jans23 avatar Mar 20 '25 19:03 jans23

As per my experience with using nk3 with kleopatra , i saw that some functions don't work that really well. Some are hit or miss like creating a new key pair on device . Others have also reported the same that it shows red light on key after trying to generate one through it. It only generates one if you have factory reset your card prior. Further investigation is needed and i will probably work with kleopatra devs to fix some bugs in meanwhile

kevin0t avatar Mar 31 '25 17:03 kevin0t

If you find cases in which the Nitrokey 3 crashes (red LED), please don't hesitate to create an issue accordingly and we'll try our best to fix it...

daringer avatar Apr 01 '25 10:04 daringer