Installing Espanso on Ubuntu 24.04 (Wayland)

27 February 2025

I spent too much time trying to figure this one out. So I thought I’d write it up for the next person in need.

The issue

Installing Espanso based on the documentation has always been quite straightforward until now. But, since Ubuntu 24.04, some users are hit with a depency issue that is impossible to solve:

The errors vary:

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of espanso-wayland:
 espanso-wayland depends on libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-0v5; however:
  Package libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-0v5 is not installed.
 espanso-wayland depends on libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-0v5 (>= 3.0.4+dfsg); however:
  Package libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-0v5 is not installed.
 espanso-wayland depends on libwxbase3.0-0v5 (>= 3.0.4+dfsg); however:
  Package libwxbase3.0-0v5 is not installed.

dpkg: error processing package espanso-wayland (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 espanso-wayland

or

espanso: error while loading shared libraries: libwx_gtk3u_html-3.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

And the worst part is that libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev is nowhere to be found!

Attempts to fix it

I tried the snap installation (got the same dependency issue), tried the compilation from source, I got a whole other range of issues.

How I did it

First and foremost, I can’t take credit for any of this. OP is davidvv and solution is here.

Reminder, I am using Wayland (and the below is only useful if you are too).

Download the deb package

I downloaded the deb version 2.2.1 of the tool:

wget https://github.com/espanso/espanso/releases/download/v2.2.1/espanso-debian-wayland-amd64.deb

Download and install the dependencies

Before installing it, let’s install the (God foresaken) dependencies. To do so, you need to add the source deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal main universe to your Ubuntu system:

echo "deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal main universe" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

then

sudo apt update

and finally install libwxgtk3.0

sudo apt install libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev

Install Espanso

Final steps! Install Espanso:

dpkg -i espanso-debian-wayland-amd64.deb 

Register as a service:

espanso service register

And run!

espanso start

Voilà!