TuxFlow 0.2.0 (Alpha)

TuxFlow 0.2.0 (Alpha) is a reliability, privacy, and trust release. It ships automatic updates, fixes every high-severity issue from a full code audit, and makes releases verifiable.

Automatic updates

• TuxFlow now checks GitHub for new versions (at most once a day, and you can turn it off in Settings). The AppImage updates itself in one click after verifying the download against the release's SHA256SUMS — no checksum, no install. Source installs get a notice with a link instead.
• New tuxflow update command for the terminal.
• The AppImage embeds zsync update information, so AppImageUpdate works too.
• The check sends a single anonymous HTTPS request to the GitHub API. Nothing about you or your dictations leaves the machine.

Reliability

• Fixed a race where releasing the shortcut a fraction of a second after pressing it could leave the microphone recording until the safety timeout.
• Failures are no longer silent: if the transcript can't be copied or pasted (missing clipboard tool, no ydotool), the app now says so instead of pretending it worked — in a banner in the control center, the tray, and a notification.
• The control center now recovers automatically when the background service has crashed, instead of failing forever until it was restarted by hand.
• Slow disks can no longer stall the background service while it saves your history, and CLI errors print a readable message instead of a Python traceback.

Privacy

• Transcription history, recordings, and TuxFlow's directories are now private to your user account (0600/0700) instead of world-readable, matching how the config file was already protected. Existing installs are healed automatically on first run.

Dictation quality

• Dictionary entries with deliberate casing ("iPhone", "macOS") are no longer mangled at the start of a sentence.
• Spoken punctuation commands ("new paragraph", "comma", …) now work as the first words of an utterance.

Verifiable releases

• Every release now ships a SHA256SUMS file:

  sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

• The AppImage build tools are pinned to exact versions and verified by checksum instead of tracking upstream "continuous" builds.

Under the hood

• Test suite grew from 58 to 213 tests; coverage from 59% to 71%, now reported in CI. The core transcription path is exercised in CI for the first time.
• CI is green on Linux and macOS. As before, macOS support is untested on real hardware — reports welcome.

This is an alpha. Expect rough edges, and please file issues.

Install

chmod +x TuxFlow-0.2.0a1-x86_64.AppImage
./TuxFlow-0.2.0a1-x86_64.AppImage

Needs glibc 2.39+ (Ubuntu 24.04+, Fedora 40+, Debian 13+). See the README for the host tools it uses and for installing from source.