How I Set Up Atera’s Special AnyDesk Links To Work From Firefox In Linux Mint 22.3

In trying to move from Windows to Linux in 2026, I was having some problems with my line of business applications. In particular, remotely controlling Windows computers using Atera — my company RMM tool (into which I have significant investment, no I won’t change that, don’t suggest that). The issue is that Atera is really geared to run from … Windows.

Atera supports several remote control apps, and the one supported that is both free and has a native Linux variant is AnyDesk. So, that part is covered.

However, there are still issues:

  1. The RMM uses a custom AnyDesk protocol prefix. So, AnyDesk links from the RMM tool aren’t just “anydesk:”, they are “anydesk-SomeRandomHexadecimalNumber:”. So, we need to create a custom protocol handler. If you don’t create your custom handler, you’ll receive an error message in the Firefox console something akin to Prevented navigation to “anydesk-f45e5af2” due to an unknown protocol.
  2. If you admin Windows machines remotely, you know that you can’t CTRL+V a password into the password field. You need to type it. To make admin easier, the customized AnyDesk client for Windows deployed by Atera has a “Type Clipboard as Text” function. Super handy if the password is 500 miles long or contains characters that are difficult to type. The Linux app… does not have this feature.
  3. There doesn’t seem to be a single concise instruction list for how to make all of this stuff work from Linux in one process. Until now.

So, here’s “Joe’s Magic Process To Set up Atera’s Special AnyDesk Links To Work From Firefox in Linux Mint 22.3”. Go easy on me. I’m barely past the newbie stage in Linux.

  1. If you have not run Firefox before, launch then close Firefox
  2. Install AnyDesk free edition from whatever means you like.
    • Random Aside: the free edition is for non-commercial use. But, if we have Atera, we have — at least from an ethical perspective — a commercial license to use it. We can’t help that Atera hasn’t created a custom version for Linux, or that AnyDesk’s free version doesn’t have the feature set we need.
  3. Edit Firefox’s handlers.json
    • Launch Firefox and browse to about:profiles in the address bar
    • Browse to the default-release Root Directory from the button shown
    • Close Firefox
    • In the directory found above, edit the handlers.json file
    • find the string that reads “anydesk”:{
    • Add -f45e5af2 directly between the k in anydesk and the double quote
    • save and close handlers.json
  4. Create a Special Anydesk Handler Script
    • create a file called specialanydesk.sh somewhere on your system and give it the following contents. Why? We need to reformat the string sent to anydesk to strip off the special protocol handler extension so it will launch correctly.
      • #!/bin/bash
      • exec=$(echo "$1" | sed -e 's/.*://' )
      • anydesk $exec
        • credit for above script: reddit
    • Save the file and change permissions on it so it is executable
  5. Create a Desktop File
    • go to /usr/share/applications and find the anydesk.desktop file
    • copy the anydesk.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications
    • rename it anydesk-f45e5af2.desktop
  6. Register the Desktop File
    • Run the following command from a terminal.
    • xdg-mime default "anydesk-f45e5af2.desktop" x-scheme-handler/anydesk-f45e5af2

At this point, Firefox links to AnyDesk remote sessions from Atera should automatically launch in AnyDesk.

If you need to copy and paste into protected fields (i.e. Windows login fields), you’ll need to follow these extra steps.

  1. install xclip
  2. install xdotool
  3. create a script called type-clipboard.sh to use xclip and xdotool to copy the clipboard to focused window
    • #!/bin/bash
    • CLIPBOARD_CONTENT=$(xclip -o -selection clipboard)
    • sleep 0.1
    • xdotool type --clearmodifiers --delay 100 --file - <<< "$CLIPBOARD_CONTENT"
      • credit for above script: several incorrect Gemini AI suggestions put together to make something that actually works.
  4. Change the permissions on the above script to executable
  5. Set up a keybinding to the above script to execute it when pressed.
    • In Mint, you get to this from System Settings -> Keyboard
    • SUPER plus a letter seems to work best for a keybinding. The Windows login field tends to ignore sequences when they contain CTRL, and anything with Shift makes the Mint window manager lose it’s mind. SUPER still isn’t great, but it’s easy to fix by getting in the habit of tapping SUPER a couple of times after you’ve injected your password.
    • What is SUPER? It’s the “Windows” key, usually.

And that should be it. This process seemed to work for me. I hope it works for you. No, I can’t support you if it doesn’t, only because I barely know how any of the above works.

In theory, one could automate this further and create a one click script that will do all of this, especially if you want set up several Linux Desktop boxen to admin multiple things using Atera and AnyDesk. I’m not that industrious.

I should stick to Active Directory and Microsoft 365 administration. *sigh*

This article was written 100% by hand by a human being. Many AI data centers were cursed out during development of this process for their incorrect instructions.