Installing on Linux
Three package formats and one caveat that is worth reading before you install anything: whether background clipboard capture works here is decided by your compositor, not by this app.
The first release has not been published yet. The download links below land on an empty releases page until the release pipeline runs against a tag. The browser version needs no install and works now.
Install it
Take the file that matches your distribution from the releases page:
# Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives
sudo apt install ./realtimeclipboard_<version>_amd64.deb
# Fedora, RHEL and derivatives
sudo dnf install ./realtimeclipboard-<version>.x86_64.rpm
# anything else
chmod +x realtimeclipboard_<version>_amd64.AppImage
./realtimeclipboard_<version>_amd64.AppImage
The AppImage needs the chmod. Downloading through a
browser clears the executable bit, and the resulting failure is a file
manager doing nothing at all when you double-click, which does not look
like a permissions problem.
Distribution floor: the app needs webkit2gtk 4.1, which is roughly Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora 36 and newer. The release is built on the oldest runner that has it, deliberately, to keep the glibc requirement as low as possible. On anything older, use the browser or the command-line client.
There is no package manager here
No Flathub, no Snap, no AUR — and no command on this page pretending otherwise. Each of those is a repository somebody has to keep in step with every release, and one that has quietly stopped being updated is worse than one that never existed: it hands people an old build and tells them it is current.
The three files above are the whole story. Each is a single artifact
from the release, none of them needs a repository, and the AppImage in
particular needs nothing installed at all — chmod +x and
run it.
Check it worked
- A tray icon appears, if your desktop shows one — GNOME needs an extension for tray icons at all, which is a GNOME decision and unrelated to this app. The window works with or without it.
- The status bar, bottom right, is the real answer. It reads
T0 · watching the system clipboardwhere background capture is available. Where it is not, it says so rather than silently doing nothing.
The Wayland caveat, stated plainly
| Session | Background capture |
|---|---|
| X11, any desktop | Yes |
| Wayland, KDE Plasma | Yes |
| Wayland, wlroots (Sway, Hyprland, river) | Yes |
| Wayland, GNOME | No — captures on focus instead |
On X11 an application is told when the clipboard changes. On Wayland that depends entirely on the compositor: KDE and the wlroots-based ones expose a protocol for it and GNOME does not. There is no way for any application to monitor the clipboard on GNOME Wayland — this is not a missing feature in this app, and no other tool has solved it either.
Where it is unavailable the app falls back to capturing when you focus it, exactly like the browser does, and says so in the status bar. If background capture is the reason you are installing, an X11 session is the answer on GNOME.
Your first sync
- Note the five-character key at the top of the app, or type your own.
- Open the app on a second device and enter the same key.
- Copy something. If the status bar said
T0, you do not need to switch windows; if it did not, click the RealtimeClipboard window once and the clip is picked up as it focuses.
The app ships set to Manual: it reads every copy you make while it is running, and that is a thing to agree to rather than inherit. Switch it to Live for the automatic behaviour.
When it does not work
The AppImage does nothing when double-clicked
chmod +x it — see above. Run it from a terminal once and
you will see the real error rather than silence.
A missing libwebkit2gtk error
The .deb declares libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 and
libgtk-3-0; installing with apt install ./file.deb
rather than dpkg -i resolves them for you. On a
distribution too old to have 4.1 at all, this is the webkit2gtk floor
above and there is no workaround.
Copying does nothing, and the status bar does not say T0
That is the Wayland matrix, not a fault. See above.
Stuck on “Connecting…”
The app tries a WebSocket and falls back to server-sent events plus POST where upgrades are blocked. If neither connects, the relay host is blocked — point the app at your own under Settings → Relay. Running one is one container.
Uninstalling
sudo apt remove realtimeclipboard # or dnf remove
yay -R realtimeclipboard-binAn AppImage is a single file: delete it. Nothing else is left behind — no clipboard content is ever written to disk, and your settings and clip history live in the app's own browser storage.
Ready to install: the download page. Every other platform: the installation guide. Something wrong or out of date here? Open an issue.