Noticed an MR that fixes building outside of UBPorts: https://gitlab.com/muhammad23012009/rockwork/-/merge_requests/4#58cb4f58166586c1ed7f076c568d41682df3661c

How to build:

cmake .  
make  

Wrote a simple systemd unit to start rockworkd:

# /home/mobian/.config/systemd/user/rockworkd.service  
[Unit]  
Description=rockworkd  

[Service]  
ExecStart=/home/mobian/bin/rockworkd  

[Install]  
WantedBy=default.target  

With this, you only need to:

• put the binaries rockwork and rockworkd into a folder, ~/bin in my example
• create the unit, systemctl --user daemon-reload, systemctl --user enable --now rockworkd.service
• create ~/.local/share/applications/rockwork.desktop

[Desktop Entry]  
Name=RockWork  
Exec=/home/mobian/bin/rockwork  
#Icon=/home/mobian/some/path/to/image.png  
Terminal=false  
Type=Application  

Now it works.

Hints:

• pairing is done via whatever tools your "desktop environment" uses, not using Rockwork
• at least in my case notifications were empty (but everything else works fine it seems)
• if you can, package it for your distro, once the MR is merged :D

EDIT: The build instructions assume an ARM machine to build on or just building on the phone