At my work I’m forced to develop on AWS EC2 with a desktop GUI. Any recommendations on what to use? I currently use xfce w/ xrdp on ubuntu but copy/paste b/w the guest & host doesn’t work and electron gui applications have bugs when launching. In the past I have used VNC with ubuntu unity but I remember having a difficult time getting that to work. As of now I use Ubuntu 16.04 but I’ll use any distro that is easier to work with.
I dont do anything like what youre talking about but I do have a headless server that I use VNC with on ubuntu server with the mate UI. I have 0 issues with it working. Perhaps its just a quirk with unity but ubuntu is dropping unity with its latest stuff. Maybe try it again with a different DE. If you have problems with it working that way I can probably help you figure it out.
Just my .02