Update _wayland-final-steps.mdx

[guidovw]

See espanso issue #1039. Registering the service needs to be done as a plain user; instructions do not reflect that.

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Name	Status	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
espanso-website	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	💬 Add feedback	May 24, 2025 0:39am

[smeech]

Thank you.

Does the documentation suggest that the command should be run as root?

[guidovw]

No, it does not say anything about that, but users might have logged in as root or admin to perform the previous steps in the procedure more easily, and then get stuck at this point.

[smeech]

I can see your point, but the instructions to use sudo for the two preceding commands here (and as you suggested in #97) are quite explicit. I know I've occasionally used sudo accidentally for something that didn't need it, but that was when I wasn't concentrating, and ended up not following instructions correctly (in which case I might have missed a warning anyway!). Generally things wouldn't work, and I'd go back and read the instruction properly before trying again.

IME, it's pretty standard in Linux not to use sudo unless necessary. Looking at that whole page, there are more non-sudo commands where a warning could be argued for. However, I'm reluctant to clutter the docs with a lot of warnings, simply for users who fail to follow the instructions, or are using an unconventional method.

[guidovw]

I see that whether a command has to be executed as root/admin or not is deducible from the presence or absence of sudo in front of the command, and that the instructions are adequate and clear from that point of view. However, following the instructions to the letter is not going to work on all systems. Installing on Debian, I got an error when doing any of the sudo commands (user is not in the list of sudoers). So I logged in as admin, and went on from there, going by the assumption that anything an ordinary user can do, an admin/root can do as well. This in fact works in most of the cases for the commands not prefixed with sudo, but registering the espanso service is one of the rare cases where this reasoning doesn't work. It led me down a garden path of thinking I must have done something wrong, which cost me several hours, until I finally hit on the solution of registering the service as a plain user. So I think in this one particular instance the instructions would benefit from this clarification, certainly for the somewhat less savvy CLI user.

[smeech]

Thank you.

I have a Debian VM - let me have a look.

[smeech]

This may have arisen because you ran the installation as admin rather than adding yourself to the etc/sudoers file? For me, the latter avoided the issue, although I haven't sorted out the subsequent dependency issues! It's probably something you'll need to do at some point.

We clearly need to fix the installation issues, but I'll keep these Issues open as a reminder, and may add a couple of words along the lines you suggest.

Thank you for raising the problem!