Dictation stopped working after a distro upgrade¶

A release upgrade changes four things YazSes depends on, and each produces a different symptom. Start here rather than reinstalling:

yazses doctor

It reports your machine rather than the general case, and the section below matches its output line by line.

1. The yazses command is gone, or crashes on import¶

The most common one. A release upgrade moves the system Python — 3.11 → 3.12, say — and a virtualenv built against the old one keeps pointing at an interpreter that no longer exists.

yazses --version

No such file or directory, or ModuleNotFoundError for something you never installed, both mean this. The fix is to rebuild the environment, not to reinstall the OS package:

# pipx
pipx reinstall yazses

# uv tool
uv tool upgrade --reinstall yazses

# a venv you made yourself
rm -rf .venv && uv sync

2. Your session switched to Wayland¶

Ubuntu and Fedora have both flipped the default session in a release upgrade. It does not announce itself, and dictation appears to work — the daemon runs, the model loads, transcription happens — but the text goes nowhere, because the injector for X11 cannot type on Wayland.

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

x11

If that now says wayland and it used to say x11, you have two options:

• Stay on Wayland and install the right injector:

yazses setup      # installs ydotool and enables ydotoold

• Go back to X11: log out, click the gear icon on the login screen, choose Ubuntu on Xorg.

Two features genuinely cannot follow you to Wayland — voice window focus and gaze routing — because one application may not focus or inspect another's window there. That is the security model, not a regression. See the capability matrix.

3. You are no longer in the input group¶

Hold-to-talk reads the keyboard through evdev, which needs group access to the device nodes:

id -nG | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -x input
ls -l /dev/input/event3

Real output here:

input
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 67 Aug 14 02:21 /dev/input/event3

crw-rw---- root input is the point: without membership of input, the device cannot be opened at all. If the first command prints nothing:

sudo usermod -aG input "$USER"

Then log out completely and back in. Group membership is established at login; a new terminal inherits the old set, so yazses doctor will keep reporting the problem until you do. It says so when the change is pending.

4. ydotoold is not running (Wayland only)¶

The Wayland injector needs its daemon, and an upgrade can leave the unit disabled:

systemctl --user status ydotoold
yazses doctor | grep -i ydotool

yazses setup      # installs it and enables the unit

wtype is not a substitute on GNOME or KDE — those compositors do not implement the virtual-keyboard protocol it needs, so it fails silently there.

5. Autostart stopped¶

The systemd user unit points at the console script, and a reinstall can move it:

systemctl --user status yazses
yazses doctor | grep -i "systemd unit"

  [OK] systemd unit: ExecStart=/home/mohsen/.local/bin/yazses-daemon

If that path no longer exists, rewrite the unit:

yazses autostart disable && yazses autostart enable

YazSes rewrites the unit itself when it notices an upgrade moved the binary, so this is a fallback rather than the normal path.

What "fixed" looks like¶

yazses doctor

  [OK] Keyboard capture: ok
  [OK] Hotkey device: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard (/dev/input/event3)
  [OK] Session type: X11
  [OK] Injection: xdotool (X11)
  [OK] Daemon: running (PID 4084, state idle, model base.en)

✓ Everything looks good — you're all set — hold right_ctrl to dictate.

What this page does not cover¶

No distribution upgrade was actually performed to write it. Each cause is diagnosed with commands run on a working machine, and each fix is the documented one — but nobody upgraded 24.04 to 26.04 and watched what broke. If you do, say what actually happened, including anything this page missed; that report is worth more than the page.