Requirements

Requirements & Optional Helpers

TypeWhisper runs on a modern Linux desktop session. The core app is self-contained, but several features rely on optional desktop helper tools that you install through your distribution.

System requirements

• A modern Linux desktop session.
• The .NET 10 SDK — only needed to build from source. Prebuilt releases bundle the runtime; see Installation.
• ffmpeg — for file-transcription imports beyond the already-supported direct formats.

Optional desktop helpers

Each helper enables a specific feature. When one is missing, the Linux UI disables the related control and explains the reason, often with session-aware install hints.

Helper	Enables
pactl	Audio ducking
playerctl	Media pause during recording
canberra-gtk-play	Sound feedback
espeak-ng, espeak, or spd-say	Spoken feedback
xclip (X11)	Clipboard for clipboard-backed auto-paste
wl-copy / wl-paste (Wayland)	Clipboard for clipboard-backed auto-paste
wtype	Wayland keyboard input on wlroots compositors (Hyprland, Sway)
ydotool	Wayland keyboard input on GNOME / KDE Wayland (where wtype is unavailable)
xdotool	Keyboard input fallback on X11 and XWayland apps

ydotool note: ydotool requires its daemon to be running and the current user to be in the input group. The Text insertion settings panel offers a one-click setup flow for the ydotool daemon and input-group membership when needed. See Wayland notes and Text insertion.

Optional CUDA backend

For GPU-accelerated transcription on compatible NVIDIA systems:

• An NVIDIA GPU and driver.
• CUDA 12 runtime/toolkit libraries providing libcudart.so.12 and libcublas.so.12.
• CUDA currently applies to the bundled whisper.cpp engine; other bundled local engines stay on CPU.

See GPU & CUDA for details.

Related pages

• Installation — release formats and build-from-source steps.
• Wayland notes — per-distro Wayland typing backend and global-hotkey setup.

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Changelog

Date	Change
2026-06-17	Initial version.