Skip to main content
OpenWhispr ships a native helper for pasting text into other applications, but Wayland sessions and system-audio capture still depend on components Linux distributions don’t all ship. Both are one-time setup, and the app tells you which pieces are missing.

​
Clipboard and pasting

​
The symptom

Pasting appears to work, but the target application shows nothing — or reports “clipboard is empty”, “no image on clipboard”, or “contents not available in the requested format”.

​
Why

Electron’s clipboard uses X11 selections through XWayland. Native Wayland applications can’t read those, so the text is on a clipboard your application isn’t looking at.

​
The fix

1

Install wl-clipboard

The most reliable clipboard support on Wayland.
  • Debian and Ubuntu: sudo apt install wl-clipboard
  • Fedora and RHEL: sudo dnf install wl-clipboard
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S wl-clipboard
2

Install a fallback paste tool

OpenWhispr’s native paste helper handles this automatically in the normal case — nothing to install for X11. Install one of these only if the app tells you the helper isn’t available:
  • X11 — xdotool
  • Sway and Hyprland — wtype
  • GNOME, KDE and other Wayland sessions — ydotool (with the ydotoold daemon running), which falls back to xdotool for XWayland apps
  • KDE Wayland — also xclip or xsel
3

Confirm OpenWhispr sees it

It checks for these tools at runtime, so a restart usually isn’t needed — the status view under Preferences → App shows what it found. If pasting still fails right after installing ydotool specifically, restart OpenWhispr once; it caches how it talks to ydotool for the rest of the session.
OpenWhispr tries clipboard methods in order — wl-copy first, then the renderer’s own clipboard, then X11 as a fallback.
On some Wayland sessions automatic pasting isn’t possible at all. OpenWhispr says so — “Clipboard Mode on Wayland” — and copies your text to the clipboard so you can paste it with Ctrl+V. That’s the designed behaviour, not a failure.
The app reports the status of each component under Settings → Preferences under App, so you can see exactly what’s missing rather than guessing.

​
System audio

​
The symptom

Meeting transcription records your microphone but not other participants, browser audio, or anything else the computer is playing.

​
The fix

System audio is captured through PipeWire, from the default sink monitor.
1

Install PipeWire

  • Debian and Ubuntu: sudo apt install pipewire libpipewire-0.3-0
  • Fedora and RHEL: sudo dnf install pipewire pipewire-libs
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S pipewire
2

Check the user service is running

For the current session.
3

Sign out and back in

After installing or updating PipeWire packages.
4

Restart OpenWhispr and start recording again

Make sure the audio you want is playing through the default sink.
No screen-share chooser appears, and none should. On Linux, OpenWhispr captures the default sink monitor directly through PipeWire — unlike macOS, there’s no permission dialog and no picker.

​
Hold-to-speak

Holding a key to dictate needs access to keyboard input devices, which most distributions don’t grant by default. The app tells you — “Hold to Speak needs extra setup” — and gives the command:
Log out and back in afterwards.

​
FAQ

Sway and Hyprland with wtype are the most straightforward. GNOME and KDE both work, with the caveats above.
Check the ydotoold daemon is actually running — the tool alone isn’t enough. The status view under Preferences shows each component separately for this reason.
Yes. Dictation and transcription work regardless; you paste manually with Ctrl+V.
Auto-paste needs ydotool and /dev/uinput access, which NixOS grants declaratively. The app detects NixOS and shows the configuration you need.