My work flow depends heavily on Win + V and Win + Shift + S, both on my main desktop and RDP’ed into other Windows systems while sharing a clipboard. I’m interested in trying Linux as my daily driver, and I am looking for suggestions that will offer the least friction in how I operate. The above items are must haves and my hope is that the solution “just works” without having to set up a whole mess of macros or workarounds.
I am familiar with Debian and Ubuntu, so Linux will not be a new experience for me, though most of my work has been from command line interactions. My hope would be a distro I can stand up in a few hours that will let me continue to RDP into Windows systems and keep using Windows hot keys on both the Linux desktop and the Windows systems.
Honestly, I’d recommend anything with KDE Plasma, as the shortcuts are dead simple to set up. Personally, I use Aurora on my non-gaming PC and Bazzite on my gaming PC. They’re both Fedora Atomic derivatives, which really means the system itself “just works”. You can set up Win+V in the shortcuts section of the settings to launch the Clipboard Manager, which I believe is what you’re looking for. As for the VM, use a KVM manager (like
virt-manager). It will have native functionality for all your needs there, though I can’t remember if shared clipboard is bidirectional or not (though that could likely be fixed). I can’t recall if it’s installed by default on either Aurora or Bazzite, but if not then you can just install it from the software store. Most things a normal user would want to install are available in the built-in software store (no going to websites and downloading dangerous exe files), and if something isn’t, then with Aurora or Bazzite, you can either check for an AppImage from the program’s download page (which is kind of like a portable exe in Windows), or layer the package. Layering is generally a last resort, as it can make updating take longer and cause inconsistency across installs, but to do it, you can just look up “how to install [program name] in Fedora” and swap thesudo dnf installforrpm-ostreeinstall.The great thing about the atomic distros I recommended are that they’re generally “just works” distros with all the codecs, drivers, and such installed by default. They’re also very resilient and stable, and if anything breaks, you can select the old version in the GRUB menu on boot to revert back to a known working version of your OS and then just
rpm-ostree rollbackin the terminal. Updates can happen entirely in the background, and while they need a reboot to apply (as would also be required with layering a new package), the boot time is not affected. The update us applied while booted with no disruption to the user, and when it reboots, the OS just switches to the new, updated branch. No “Updating… Please wait” screens. You wouldn’t even notice an update.I tend to recommend atomic distros to new users, as they’re far less prone to breakage, thus causing less frustration. Hope this helps!
Heyhey, nice overview, though on the “just works” thing on atomic/immutable distros I want to say that that’s not the case by virtue of a system being atomic.
I’m on Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite layers on) and the codecs you’d expect being on there aren’t because of licensing (just like all of Fedora’s distros).
I also don’t believe Fedora Atomic does anything in particular in regards to drivers. So the advantages you’re talking about are there because of the people who worked on Bazzite.
On breakage, it’s definitely not a bad thing for a system to *gently* push users into installing software in user space and with some isolation, but it’s far from a requirement for a stable system.
And if you’re going to be layering everything anyway (so installing basically only installing using rpm-ostree), you’re not gaining much by choosing an atomic distribution. Those layers can conflict like with any other distro packages
Fedora KDE, which I ran for almost a year, has not given me any issues except for the codecs which I had to install myself.
It’s actually more of a pain to get codecs to work on Fedora Atomic because of how RPM Fusion needs to work with layering (https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/OSTree), which wasn’t an issue on standard Fedora.
So you’ll end up needing to manually updating the repository RPM Fusion repository every 6 months.
Also some software, like Steam, is also a pain to work with when using the Flatpak. \
VanillaOS (which *doesn’t* use rpm-ostree since it’s based on Debian) and Bazzite are both good atomic distros if you really want that, while having those kind of annoyances handled for you.