v0.10.1-beta
"Your Laptop Slept, But Vocalinux Didn't" Release
Hey folks! 👋
This is a patch release focused on making Vocalinux rock-solid reliable. We squashed some annoying bugs and added something pretty cool: your voice dictation now survives your laptop going to sleep. Yeah, really.
✨ What's New
🖼️ Tray Icons That Actually Show Up
Remember when the system tray icon would sometimes vanish into the void? We fixed that. The icons are now properly bundled in the package, so they'll be there when you need them.
🧠 Engine Switches Without the Crash
Switching speech engines used to occasionally trigger a segfault (super fun, we know). Now we stop recognition before switching engines, so no more random crashes.
⌨️ Your Keyboard Layout Stays Put
Activating the IBus engine for Wayland text injection was accidentally resetting your keyboard layout to English. No more "wait, why did my Spanish accents stop working?" moments.
🪟 Settings Dialog Plays Nice With All Window Managers
Added a proper Close button to the Settings dialog. Some window managers weren't showing their own close button, leaving users stuck. Now there's no escape. 😈
⚡ Vocalinux Survives Sleep (The Coolest Feature)
This is the big one. We added a suspend handler that listens for your system going to sleep and wakes back up with it.
What happens:
- When your laptop sleeps → Vocalinux gracefully pauses
- When you wake up → Vocalinux automatically:
- Waits 2 seconds for your audio hardware to get ready
- Reinitializes the speech engine (fresh start, no stale state)
- Restarts keyboard shortcut monitoring (with a 6-second delay to let USB devices finish re-enumerating)
Your shortcuts and dictation just... work, even after a sleep cycle. We've been testing this extensively and it's genuinely satisfying to see it in action.
🎤 Push-to-Talk Got Smarter
If you're using Push-to-Talk mode (hold key to talk, release to stop), you might have noticed transcription triggering at random times while holding the key. That's now fixed — silence no longer triggers transcription while you're holding the button. Only releasing the key will do that.
🔒 Copy-to-Clipboard Now Off by Default
We disabled the "copy to clipboard" feature by default. Most users don't need it, and it was causing confusion when text appeared in the clipboard unexpectedly. You can still enable it in Settings if you want that behavior.
🐛 Bug Fixes Galore
| Issue | Fix |
|---|---|
| #349 / #354 | Bundled tray icons properly |
| #350 / #355 | Stop recognition before engine switch |
| #323 / #356 | Added Close button to Settings |
| #292 / #343 | Preserved XKB layout on IBus activation |
| #359 | Fixed PTT premature transcription |
| #367 / #369 | Added suspend/resume recovery |
| #371 | Restart keyboard after resume |
| #372 | Delay keyboard restart for USB |
| #370 | Disabled copy-to-clipboard by default |
🔧 Maintenance
- Updated npm/yarn dependencies across the web workspace
- Bumped
brace-expansiondev dependency
👏 Contributors & Issue Reporters
This release wouldn't be possible without the community reporting issues and helping us understand what's broken:
Issue Reporters 🐛
- @ericzundel — Reported missing tray icons (#349) and engine switch segfaults (#350)
- @mr-bembel — Reported missing Close button on Settings dialog (#323)
- @jgbarah — Reported XKB layout being lost on IBus activation (#292)
- @Jay-0815Ger — Reported Vocalinux dying after system suspend/resume (#367)
Code Contributors 💻
- @jatinkrmalik — All code contributions in this release (me!) 😅
- @dependabot[bot] — Dependency updates (#346, #357)
Documentation Heroes 📖
- @ericzundel — Amazing guide on running Vocalinux on Fedora Atomic/Bazzite with Distrobox
📚 Community Tutorial: Running Vocalinux on Fedora Atomic
Fedora Atomic/Bazzite users! We've got you covered. Community member @ericzundel wrote an incredible guide on running Vocalinux on immutable Fedora distributions using Distrobox. Check it out:
👉 Running Vocalinux on Bazzite (Fedora Atomic / Immutable)
👏 Thank Yous
As always, thanks to everyone who filed issues, tested fixes, and helped make Vocalinux more reliable. You're the best.
📦 Get It
curl -fsSL raw.githubusercontent.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux/main/install.sh -o /tmp/vl.sh && bash /tmp/vl.sh --interactiveOr if you already have Vocalinux, just re-run the installer to update.
Stay awesome — and keep dictating. 🚀
