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I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a MacBook Pro, using both the internal keyboard, and an extended external one: UK version, numeric pad, arrows keys, function (fn), home end up down, and with f13 to f19. I only installed the minimum Ubuntu without tweaks for the moment, and I move step by step to get my workflow with Open Source / Free Software that I already use on Mac OS, with no more proprietary software. That is my goal. I am searching for an ethical and sustainable laptop, with open hardware too, but this is another story.

I successfully installed kinto.sh on my admin user. It is a superb implementation, thank you Ben Reaves

But for my standard user, without admin privileges, it is not available. I appreciate that the install on kinto is on the admin user side, so it is not a surprise. With my little system admin skills, I cannot find a way to make it work for all uses of the Linux install.

Note: I kept the habitude, from using Mac OS, and when I have to work on Windows, to have a standard user for every day work, for each person, and to only use the admin/sudo user for maintenance, installs and updates. I find it safer, isolated, and necessary for privacy concerns.

  1. Please could you help me to make Kintosh work for a standard user? I will be glad to test and help writing the necessary explanation for other user, like me, who wants to achieve that. (issue also posted on kinto.sh GitHub)

  2. Please could you point me to alternative solutions? I've searched here and on search engines, but I mostly found the basic switch between Cmd <-> Ctrl, or very old answers, not working in 20.04. At least I need the main Mac shortcuts like Cmd+C V or X, Cmd-N and T for New window or tab, for my thumb and my muscle memory!

As I am not an avid Terminal user, I can compromise and use Ctrl instead, and not having the copy/paste in the Terminal. I am sure it would be very useful for average users, using Linux without developer or geek skills

(this is my first question on Ask Ubuntu / StackExchange, after reading so many good solutions, I wanted to say thank you to the ones I like, and I am finally contributing a bit)

Hervé B.
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2 Answers2

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This will be addressed in a future update of Kinto.sh (am the author). Also Kinto installer already sets itself up in a way to prevent the need for users to type in their root password everytime - and is only needed because of uinput, the plan is to add uinput to a lower privileged group/user though to avoid that. I just want to carry out some thorough testing on various distros after making the change.

R Ben R
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I have just stumbled upon the same issue. I have an old macbook pro which is still quite usable and powerful, but unfortunately it is no longer supported by Apple and receives no further upgrades. This is likely to be the case for a lot of users out there and Linux (Ubuntu) seems to be a highly viable alternative to MacOS. It is powerful, fast, easy to use, and even supports the hardware fully.

This makes me wonder: how hard it actually is to setup Linux to use the same keyboard shortcuts of a mac keyboard, so that people don't need to wrap their heads around the rather strange and sometimes inconsistent behaviour of the keyboard shortcuts?

I'm guessing that this issue is surprisingly difficult, judging by my struggle to get kinto.sh running on Ubuntu 24.04. For the record, the setup instructions won't work out of the box. The way around it for me was to use a virtual environment. It worked for me with these changes:

  1. Before anything run the command: python -m venv kinto_venv --system-site-packages, and then . kinto_venv/bin/activate. You can name your venv anything as far as I know and put anywhere. Any recommendations?
  2. Change the path: export PATH=/home/waldeck/Applications/kinto_venv/bin:$PATH After these the setup.py should run without any issues. Perhaps it would work better everywhere if venvs were adopted by the author? It would also be great if the solution could be packaged somehow to make the installation easier and transparent to the user.

Anyway, just wanted to give some feedback and hope that it will be helpful to someone who is also struggling with this. Now my keys seem to be working perfecly just like they do on MacOS. How sweet!

Edit: I forgot to mention that setting the path was not enough to get it going. I also had to manually edit the file xkeysnail_service.sh and change all occurrences of pip3 by a fully qualified path to the pip3 version in my folder kinto_venv/bin. I am not sure why, since pip3 should have been reachable by the PATH.

Waldeck Schutzer
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