Installing on Linux

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>-1.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. Right-click it for the menu: that is the whole interaction on Linux, where a tray icon receives no clicks of its own. Open and Quit are both in there. Closing the window does not quit — the window works with or without a tray icon, and so does Ctrl+Shift+V.
• The status bar, bottom right, is the real answer. It reads T0 · watching the system clipboard where background capture is available. Where it is not, it says so rather than silently doing nothing.

The Wayland caveat, stated plainly

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

1. Note the short key at the top of the app, or type your own.
2. Open the app on a second device and enter the same key.
3. 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 switch at the top of the window is Clipboard by default, so everything you copy is shared. It reads every copy you make while it is running, which is a thing worth knowing rather than inheriting — the app says so on first launch, and App stops anything leaving the machine until you paste it in.

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 library error on install

The .deb declares libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0, libgtk-3-0 and libayatana-appindicator3-1 | libappindicator3-1; installing with apt install ./file.deb rather than dpkg -i resolves them for you. The last one is what draws the tray icon, and it is named as an alternation because the plain package is gone from newer Debian while the ayatana one is absent from some older releases — your distribution will have one of the two. On a distribution too old to have webkit2gtk 4.1 at all, this is the 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-bin

An 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.