Panama absorbed Users, Sharing, Printers and Online Accounts one page at a time.
Each time, the row pointing at GNOME's equivalent stayed exactly where it was --
so an app whose stated purpose is to make GNOME Settings unnecessary shipped four
doors back to it, two of them inside a card headed "these areas remain owned by
Fedora and GNOME's mature system panels".
Nothing failed. Every row worked as written. They were simply no longer true, and
no test could notice, because none of them knew what Panama had come to own in
the meantime. gnome-handoff-contract reads the sidebar for the pages that exist
and the pages for the panels they hand off, and fails on any overlap -- derived
from both sides rather than a hand-kept list, so absorbing the next page cannot
leave a stale door behind. Adding an online account is allow-listed with its
reason: it genuinely requires GOA's own dialog.
health-ui-contract asserted those handoffs were present, which is how they
survived. The assertion is inverted rather than deleted, so reintroducing one
fails loudly.
The Home Assistant "Light entities" box is gone. It was a multi-line list of
comma-separated Zigbee entity IDs, and the light catalog does not come from it --
the helper discovers that live. It is a one-time migration seed for the Control
Center selection, so saving now passes the stored value back untouched: setting a
URL or a token cannot disturb it. Deleting the control naively would have written
an empty list over it.
Sharing showed two "Port" rows for RDP, same label and value, one read-only and
one editable, separated by a switch. The read-only leftover is gone. The SSH port
stays read-only because sshd's port is not ours to write.
About reported "488G free of 1.9T" where Storage said "523 GB free of 2.0 TB" --
the same drive, binary against decimal. About uses decimal now, matching how
drives are sold. Memory and swap stay in GiB, which is how RAM is sold.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Appearance was six cards deep and Light/Dark was the third of them, below the
wallpaper grid and the entire lock screen -- so the control reached most often
was the last one you got to. It is five tabs now, Theme first. The mock showed
four; the page turned out to have eleven cards, so Titlebars and Windows became
Windows, and Clock and vitals became Shell, rather than pretending four would
hold them.
Region, Date & Time and Displays each rendered a complete dataset as rows: every
installed locale, the whole tz database, every mode the monitor advertises. The
chooser was never the problem -- SearchPicker already existed and worked. It was
simply rendered always-expanded, so the one line saying what is currently set sat
under hundreds that were not. PickerRow collapses each behind its current value
and closes again once something is picked.
The avatar never appeared to change because accountsservice writes every picture
to the same path, leaving the URL byte-identical while Qt served its cached
image. cache:false was already set and could not have helped: an unchanged source
is never re-read at all. avatarUrl now carries a revision fragment, bumped only
when a write actually succeeds. Pictures are cropped before they are set, in the
picture's own pixel coordinates so the result does not depend on the size it
happened to be displayed at, and written out at 512x512 through GdkPixbuf --
already a dependency here, so nothing new is required.
Snapshots listed nothing. The timeline and its Delete buttons existed the whole
time, behind a row labelled "Browse...", a word that promises a file browser. The
three most recent points are shown inline now, with the rest one press away.
qmldir-registration-contract exists because an unregistered component is not a
quiet problem: Quickshell fails the entire configuration on it, so the settings
window dies and the bar and dock go with it. That happened twice while writing
this, both times on a machine somebody was using. It is pure file inspection, so
it runs before a change ever reaches the running shell.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Every container on this machine is created by rootless podman-compose and
labelled with the project it belongs to, so the grouping is read from the
labels rather than invented. State then decides prominence within that
grouping -- running containers get rows, stopped ones collapse to a line --
which is why neither axis had to be chosen over the other.
Acting on a stack uses plain podman over the labelled set, never
`podman-compose down`, which would remove containers this shell did not
create. The compose file is the source of truth for what exists and belongs
to the repository. Nothing here needs privilege.
The findings on top are the crossing the Firewall page reports, seen from the
side that can close it: the firewall knows only that something is listening,
while this page knows which container, which compose file, and which token is
missing from it. So `bind-local` prepends a loopback address and leaves the
line byte-for-byte -- variables, quoting and style intact -- then re-parses and
rolls back unless exactly those ports moved. It refuses anything ambiguous
rather than guessing. Rewriting the mapping to the port podman reports today
would have deleted the ${POSTGRES_PORT} indirection that makes it
configurable at all.
Unused volumes are read from podman's own dangling filter. The first version
used MountCount, which is a runtime lock counter and not a usage signal: it
reads zero for a volume a running container has mounted this second, so
"remove unused volumes" offered to delete the live Command Center database.
The cross-check against `podman system df` is what exposed it. The contract
reintroduces that bug deliberately and fails if the guard does not catch it,
because a guard nobody has seen fail proves nothing.
Every mutation in the contract runs against a stubbed podman. Nothing in the
suite starts, stops or removes a real container, image or volume.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Listing zones and services is what firewall-cmd already does. The
question it does not answer needs both halves at once: a port is
reachable only when something is LISTENING on a network address AND the
firewall permits it.
On this machine that crossing is the whole story. The rules look
unremarkable -- one zone, three services, a port range -- and what they
mean is that PostgreSQL and Redis, published by rootless containers on
every interface, are reachable by anyone on the network. Neither half
says that alone, which is exactly how a tidy rules list coexists with an
open database. Nothing was misconfigured: Fedora's default zone met
podman's default publish behaviour.
Ephemeral client sockets are excluded. A browser's outbound UDP port is
indistinguishable from a service in ss, and listing twenty of them
buried the two rows that mattered.
Closing the port range names what it would cut off, by service, before
doing it, and removing ssh says so when someone is connected over it.
Rich rules are shown and never edited: a syntax is not a setting, but
hiding it would misrepresent the configuration.
The contract needed a recorded firewall, and the reason is worth
keeping. The rule this page exists for cannot be tested against this
machine -- its zone permits everything above 1024, so "listening" and
"listening and permitted" give identical answers, and a blocked listener
needs a port below 1024, which needs root. With the crossing deleted,
the contract passed. It now runs against a fixture where two listeners
are blocked, and catches it.
Also here: polkit response files are written 0600 rather than at the
default mask, the agent sweeps requests left by an instance that did not
exit cleanly, and the write sweep waits for its harness to be ready
instead of reporting the startup race as settings that failed.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Live first, because unlike every other page here this one has a live
dimension: card temperature, power draw, whether Game Mode actually
engaged. It polls only while it is open, since a settings page nobody is
looking at has no business waking the CPU.
The part that makes it Panama's page rather than a gamemode config
editor is the hook. gamemode runs a script when a game asks for it and
another when the game exits, so the power profile switches to
performance and notifications go quiet for exactly the duration of a
game -- and afterwards both go back to what they WERE, not to a default.
A Do Not Disturb someone set by hand survives a game; a power profile
someone chose is restored rather than replaced. Verified against real
gamemode activation, not merely by calling the hook.
Two things the page reports rather than hides. Game Mode's headline
trick is switching the CPU governor to performance, and this machine
already runs performance, so it says so instead of implying it helps.
And Proton builds are listed but never chosen: Steam picks the runtime
per game, and a control here would claim an authority this page does not
have.
The hook first called a notifications function that did not exist, and
the one that did was a TOGGLE -- the wrong primitive entirely, since
toggling at game start would unsilence notifications that were already
silent. The shell gained an explicit setter and reader.
search-routing-contract kept its own hand-written list of every page,
which made adding one fail as "not a known page" -- a sixth place to
register a page and a sixth chance to forget. It now derives the mapping
from the shell, which already knows it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
The page had a row for the case where dnf-automatic is absent and
nothing for the case where it is present, so installing it made the
setting disappear rather than appear.
The switch enables downloading only, which is the shipped default and
the right one to keep: a machine that installs packages unattended can
reboot into a kernel nobody chose. Downloading ahead of time is what
makes the install quick when someone does choose it, and the row says
exactly that rather than implying updates apply themselves.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Three sources that fail independently, so they are counted and applied
separately: a flatpak mirror being down says nothing about whether a
kernel security fix is waiting. Blending them into one number would hide
exactly the case that matters.
Checking costs about nine seconds, which is too long to spend every time
a page opens, so the page opens on the last result and says when it was
taken. A first visit with nothing cached goes and finds out rather than
showing a confident "up to date" it has no basis for.
Installing packages takes a snapshot first, named after what is about to
happen, so Snapshots shows "before 32 package updates" rather than a
timestamp. Best effort: a machine without snapper still updates, because
an update that refuses to run when a nicety fails would be worse than
one without a restore point.
Automatic updates cover applications only, through a Panama-owned user
timer running daily with a randomized delay. Packages still ask, and
dnf-automatic is reported as absent rather than offered, because
installing software is not a settings action.
Health gained a check, and that is where the bug was: it first returned
status "degraded", which is not in the doctor's vocabulary of ok,
warning, error and unconfigured. It was counted as nothing at all while
the summary still said healthy -- the same silent no-op this codebase
keeps relearning. A contract now asserts every status a check can return
is one the doctor counts, and the doctor's own contract knows about the
new check rather than failing on its arrival.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Two of the three panels still handed to GNOME, having actually checked
each rather than repeating that they were not worth owning.
Universal Access turned out to be mostly ours already: the magnifier,
pointer size, text scale, motion and dimming were all present. High
contrast was the real gap. It reaches GTK4 applications through the
desktop portal, which republishes GNOME's accessibility setting as
org.freedesktop.appearance contrast -- so no high-contrast theme is
involved, and none is installed here. Verified end to end: committing
the preference drove gsettings and the portal reported contrast 1.
Sticky, slow and bounce keys stay absent. There is no Wayland or
Hyprland implementation, and the compositor would store the XKB option
while nothing ever acted on it.
Remote desktop gained port, view-only, and clearing stored credentials.
SETTING credentials opens a terminal running grdctl, which prompts for
the password itself. That is not a hand-off for lack of effort: grdctl
takes the password on a terminal and core-dumps without one, and the
only alternative -- passing it as an argument -- would publish it
through /proc to every process on this machine. Typed into grdctl
directly it never passes through Panama, and a contract now fails if it
ever appears on a command line.
Color stays with GNOME, and not for lack of effort either. colord runs
here with seven profiles and zero devices registered, because the
daemons that register displays do not run under this session, and
Hyprland exposes no ICC, gamma, or color-management option at all. A
Color page could import a profile, attach it to nothing, and change
nothing -- the same failure refused for rollback and printer drivers.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
The machine already had snapper running hourly on btrfs, so the tool was
never missing. What was missing is that snapper's only configuration
covered / -- and /home is a separate subvolume with no configuration at
all. Six hundred and forty-three snapshots existed and not one of them
contained a document. Anyone reaching for file history would have found
their system and none of their files.
/home now has a configuration on the same hourly timeline, with
deliberately conservative retention: Steam's 1.2 TB lives on that
subvolume and churns on every game update, so keeping five hourly and
seven daily bounds what those updates can pin.
Per volume, because on this machine "one is covered and the important
one is not" was the news, and a timeline opening on system snapshots
would have buried it. Inside a volume the timeline is the familiar view:
points in time, newest first, each openable as a folder tree to take a
file out of.
Restoring sets the current version aside as .before-restore-N rather
than overwriting it. A restore that destroys the thing you were about to
compare against is how someone loses the work they were trying to save.
Rollback is deliberately absent. snapper's rollback changes the btrfs
default subvolume, and this system's fstab pins subvol= explicitly,
which overrides it -- so a rollback would report success and change
nothing after a reboot. A recovery feature that silently does nothing is
worse than not having one, and making it work means editing fstab and
the bootloader, whose failure cannot be repaired from inside the
desktop.
Per-snapshot size is reported as not measured, because measuring it
needs btrfs quotas that cost performance on every write. Free space is
shown instead, which is the number that decides anything.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
The fourth panel this desktop handed to GNOME Settings, and the last one
worth owning.
Driverless only, deliberately. Adding a printer that describes its own
capabilities over IPP is supported; choosing a PPD or fetching a vendor
driver is not, and the page says so rather than pretending. That
restraint is the whole design: a wrong driver produces a printer that
accepts jobs, reports success, and prints nothing, which is the worst
failure this page could ship because it looks like it worked. A printer
old enough to need a PPD stays a job for the system printer tool.
Printers and the queue are separate cards because they answer separate
questions. Which printers exist is one; where a document went is the
other, and it is the one that actually brings someone here -- so the
queue is a single list across every printer.
Device URIs are validated by scheme before reaching CUPS, whose backends
run as root. file: and pipe: do not lead to a printer and are refused
here rather than further down.
This machine has no printer, so the page was built against a temporary
CUPS queue that was created, exercised through the service, and removed;
the service was confirmed to observe the removal rather than merely
perform it. Discovery and the driverless add path are verified by their
refusals rather than against hardware.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Two of the panels this desktop still handed to GNOME Settings.
Users manages the account through accountsservice -- the same daemon
GNOME's panel drives, so a name or picture set here is what the login
screen and lock screen read. Name, picture, account type, password,
automatic login, and adding or removing other accounts. Every change is
authorized by polkit through the agent this session already runs; a
dismissed prompt is a normal outcome and says so.
A new password is read from the helper's stdin, hashed by openssl
reading its own stdin, and handed over D-Bus from inside that process.
It is never an argument: argv is world-readable through /proc, so a
password passed that way is published to every process on the machine.
Removing an account takes two presses and says it destroys their files;
the last administrator cannot be removed or demoted, because a machine
nobody can administer is not a state to offer.
Sharing reports what is actually true, including "the software for this
is not installed" -- the honest answer for Samba here, and the case the
panel it replaces shows as a switch that does nothing. Password sign-in
is reported from sshd's configuration rather than assumed: claiming
"keys only" when the file is silent would state a security property that
cannot be backed up.
The Control Center now draws the account's real picture and name. A
generic glyph sat there while a real avatar was already set, which made
the desktop look like it did not know whose it was.
Also here: the KDE Connect contract no longer requires a phone to be
awake. kdeconnectd drops its device objects for a phone it has not seen
recently while the pairing survives in its config, so demanding one
failed whenever the phone was off.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Three bugs, all silent, all in the same feature.
The write always worked. What failed was the refresh after it. That
refresh is called from the mutation's own onExited handler and was
guarded on `busy`, a binding over both processes -- and a binding hands
back its cached value until the change notification feeding it has been
delivered, which inside that handler has not happened yet. So `busy`
read true, refresh returned immediately, and the page kept showing the
old application with no error anywhere. Guards now read the Process
objects directly, where the value is current, and a refresh is no longer
blocked by the mutation that asked for it.
The service also kept its own list of which roles it would accept. It
stayed at seven when the helper and the page grew documents, text and
archives, so choosing a PDF viewer set an error and changed nothing.
It is derived from the snapshot now.
And category matching never worked. DesktopEntries returns a QML list,
for which Array.isArray is false, so the code stringified it into
"Network,WebBrowser" and split on ";" alone -- one token matching no
category. Browsers still appeared because their generic name contains
"web browser" and the terms fallback carried the role by itself.
Archives matched nothing at all, so that row could only ever offer the
application it already had.
The harness that should have caught the first bug passed while it was
live: it set each role to the value it already had and asserted no error
appeared, and the bug produces no error. It now changes a role to a
genuinely different application, requires the service to observe the new
value, and changes it back -- with the contract restoring the original
from the outside however the run ends.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Managing a stored credential meant installing Seahorse. The keyring
rows on Privacy could say whether it was locked and nothing about what
was in it.
Four rules, each pinned by a contract, because each is a way this could
leak the thing it exists to protect:
Listing never reads values. Enumerating reports labels and attributes;
it does not ask the keyring to hand over what it is protecting.
A secret never reaches a command line. /proc makes argv readable by
every process on this machine, so a password passed as an argument is
published to all of them. The helper reads the value in process and
writes it to wl-copy on stdin.
A secret never reaches an error message, a log, or a QML property. An
exception raised while holding a password does not get to choose what
text is printed, so the clipboard tool's stderr is discarded rather
than echoed.
Forgetting one is irreversible, so the first press asks and the second
does it, and the confirming button is the only one wearing danger.
The list is collapsed until asked for: opening Privacy should not
enumerate someone's passwords as a side effect. A copied value clears
itself about a minute later, but only if the clipboard still holds it --
the guard compares a SHA-256, so the waiting process never has the
password.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Nothing showed what was using the drive, and removable media was handled
by a tray helper with no surface in Settings at all.
One scroll rather than tabs: space above, the device below. Every other
settings page is a scrolling card stack, and a tab would not be
deep-linkable from the launcher command or from search.
Three things the page has to get right, each now pinned by a contract,
because each is a way it could quietly lie. / and /home are one btrfs
filesystem sharing one pool of free space, and a page that copies df
shows double the free space that exists. zram is a block device and is
not storage; counting it as a drive overstates this machine by 8 GB.
Unmount and eject refuse anything not on a removable drive, because the
UI is what asks and a UI can be wrong.
The cheap read -- layout, usage, health -- runs when the page opens, at
around 90ms. Measuring what is filling the drive means walking every
file, so it happens on request and says so rather than showing an empty
list that reads as "nothing here".
Partitioning and formatting are deliberately absent. A settings pane is
the wrong place to put erasing a disk two clicks deep; the page opens
GNOME Disks for that.
Adding the page found a fourth hard-coded page list in ShellState. A
page missing from it does not error -- openSettings() falls back to
"home", so the launcher opens the wrong page and logs nothing. A
registry contract now holds the three lists together.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Settings had a search index and the launcher had script commands, and
neither knew about the other: finding a setting meant opening Settings
first and searching there. One command per page is now generated from
the same sources the in-app search reads -- the sidebar page list, the
group routing, and the schema labels -- so a setting searchable inside
Settings is searchable from the launcher without a second list to
maintain.
Generating it surfaced a gap in the in-app search as well. Six pages had
no vocabulary at all, because their contents come from the system rather
than our schema, so searching "volume" found nothing in Settings either.
They now carry entries, which improves both surfaces.
The product prefix is dropped from every hand-written command title. The
generated ones are qualified "Settings: <page>" instead: a bare page
label collides with the feature of the same name, and two commands
sharing a title are indistinguishable in a launcher.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Every role carried a single representative type, so setting "Images"
changed image/png and left image/jpeg wherever it landed. That is how
this desktop ended up opening PDFs in GIMP, PNGs in a pixel-art editor
and MP3s in a video transcoder: nobody chose any of it, applications
registered themselves for everything they could read, and the roles
governed one type each.
Roles now own families and write every type when set, the settings page
exposes the documents, text and archives roles it never offered, and a
new seed command curates a fresh machine during setup while always
keeping a choice the user has already made.
The shipped editor entry launches kitty explicitly. The stock
nvim.desktop sets Terminal=true, which defers to whatever the system
considers default rather than the terminal this desktop themes.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
colour -> color, behaviour -> behavior, centre -> center, favourite ->
favorite, and about twenty other pairs, applied consistently across
comments, docs, error/UI copy, and a handful of QML identifiers that
used the British spelling as their actual name: SystemSettings'
serialiseValue/serialiseTable/normaliseGradient, Displays'
normaliseModes, Wallpaper's normalisePolicy, SettingsBackup's
serialiseHomeState, DateTime's ntpSynchronised property, Clipboard's
_normalise helper, and ShortcutCapture's cancelled signal (with its
onCancelled handler in ShortcutsPage.qml). Every call site and the two
tests that assert on the literal source text (settings-ownership and
settings-backup-live contracts) were updated in lockstep.
Left untouched: config/dot/espanso/match/packages/misspell-en/ is a
vendored third-party autocorrect dictionary -- its entries are typo
corrections, not our prose, and rewriting them would fight the
package's own purpose (and any future re-sync from upstream).
The already-American `favorites` property (Home page pinned
accessories) was never actually misspelled -- only nearby comments and
error strings said "favourites" -- so no data migration was needed
there.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
NotificationCenter.qml, CalendarPopup.qml, and RecordingIndicator.qml
were never instantiated anywhere -- shell.qml builds NotificationList,
DateMenu, and CaptureOverlay in their place. Verified with a repo-wide
grep before deleting; updated the two stale comments in Notifs.qml
that still pointed at NotificationCenter.
DESKTOP-PARITY.md still described Wi-Fi QR sharing as deliberately
omitted, though it was since built. The System Health colour-profile
handoff pointed at GNOME's colour panel as if it worked, but the
daemon that actually loads an ICC profile doesn't run in this session,
so it silently does nothing -- reworded the card to say so. Displays
carried two verify-timer attempt counters that were incremented but
never read anywhere.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
The recent accent-colour setting only reached part of the desktop.
looks.lua still hardcoded the focused-window border and glow to blue,
so any hyprctl reload -- or every fresh session, for about a second --
reverted a chosen accent; it now reads accentName the same way it
already read colorScheme. The lock screen and terminal stayed blue
regardless of the chosen accent despite the setting's own description
claiming otherwise; panama-lock and panama-theme-apps now resolve and
apply the real accent.
AccentPicker built its swatch model from Theme.accents directly
instead of the schema's own options list, so the two could drift
silently; switched it to read the schema. Its hit target only covered
the swatch, not the name label added specifically for colour-vision
accessibility -- extended to the whole row. Settings search had no
route for the "appearance" group, so searching for the accent or
colour scheme landed on Home.
ColorScheme's hex-to-Hyprland helper assumed 6-digit colours and would
silently corrupt a future translucent one; fixed it to read from the
end of the string instead of the start. An accent-only change no
longer reruns the full colour-scheme pipeline. The gradient it builds
for the focused border now goes through SystemSettings' existing
serialiser instead of a second, under-escaped copy of the same logic.
The settings-ownership contract test enforced the old rule that
ColorScheme must never touch the focused border; updated it to verify
the real, intended rule instead of contradicting the code.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
WifiList and the notification toasts built their model from a plain
computed array, so any background property tick (a scan result, an
unrelated notification arriving) reassigned the whole array and the
Repeater destroyed and recreated every delegate -- including one with
an open, focused password field or an in-progress reply. Switched
both to a ScriptModel, which diffs by identity instead of resetting.
ValueSlider had its pointer-to-value mapping offset by 16px (the
hit-area margin was applied with the wrong sign), so 0% was
unreachable and every click landed to the right of where it was
placed -- affects every slider in the shell. SliderRow used -1 as a
sentinel for "nothing pending," which collides with legitimate
negative preference values like pointer sensitivity.
Dock intellihide read the globally focused workspace instead of each
monitor's own, so an empty workspace on one screen could hide the
dock on another; ActivityPanel rebuilt every row once a second during
a recording because the elapsed-time read lived in the model
construction instead of each row's own binding.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
Phase 4, first slice. Theme.qml hardcoded the Prism pair, so the one
thing that carries every state meaning in the desktop -- focused, active,
on -- was the one thing nobody could change. 74 files read Theme.accent,
so making it a setting moves all of them at once.
Named accents rather than a colour picker, which is the design decision
worth defending. One hex cannot serve both schemes: a colour legible on
the Moon background is usually illegible on the Day one, and a picker
that lets someone build an unreadable desktop is not a feature. So each
name carries a curated pair per scheme, and every one of the sixteen
resulting colours measures at least 3:1 against the ground it sits on --
checked, not assumed. It is also GNOME's model, which is the parity
being chased.
The focused window border comes with it, and only because the ownership
rule made that safe. ColorScheme owns the inactive border as a
scheme-relative contrast role; the focused Prism border is the accent
role owned by the theme. Writing it from the accent would have been
reckless before that boundary existed, since a scheme change would have
erased the user's choice. Both borders are now pushed together, because
each accent carries separate light and dark pairs, so switching schemes
must restate the focused border too.
The gradient is written as a Lua table, not a string. The string form
carries only one stop, and passing two as a string is accepted and
silently keeps the previous value.
Swatches are drawn as the gradient they produce rather than as flat
dots, because the gradient is what is being chosen. Each carries its
name permanently rather than in a tooltip: telling swatches apart by
colour is precisely what someone with a colour vision deficiency cannot
do, which is also why the palette is named in the first place.
Verified end to end by switching to rose and watching the compositor
report eeff757f/eec099ff, then reverting.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Four places in the entire shell could reach Settings. The bar, where a
person looks first, was not one of them -- and Pill has routed
right-click to a secondaryActivated signal all along, which nothing
connected, so the gesture did nothing on every widget in the bar.
Each widget now opens the page that owns its settings: the clock and the
calendar reminder open Date & Time, weather opens Home, the vitals
readout opens Appearance, the status glyphs open Network & Devices, the
media readout opens Sound, and the privacy indicator opens Privacy &
Security. Left-click behaviour is untouched.
Two routing bugs found while picking those destinations, both of the
same kind and both invisible from the code, since each page reads
perfectly well on its own:
weather routed to Appearance while every weather control lives on
Home, so searching "temperature unit" opened a page without it.
vitals routed to Appearance, but the refresh interval sat on Home
while the toggles it governs sat on Appearance -- one concept split
across two pages, which is exactly what the ownership rule forbids.
The interval now sits beside the toggles and Home's stub card is gone.
The jump contract guards the failure mode these share. openSettings()
falls back to Home for an unknown page, sensibly and completely
silently, so a typo or a later rename turns a right-click into "opens
the wrong page" with nothing logged. It also fails a Pill-based bar
widget that leaves right-click unconnected, since that is how the
gesture came to be inert everywhere in the first place.
A third instance of the routing bug is still open: followMouse and
pointerSensitivity sit in the input group, which routes to Keyboard,
while both render on Mouse. Fixing it is a two-line group change in
PreferenceSchema.qml, which codex currently owns, so the contract that
catches all three lands with that fix rather than red.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Measured the gap first: of the 38 real Hyprland options Panama's own Lua
sets, only 16 were editable in Settings. Everything else required a text
editor, which is the thing this app exists to stop. This closes most of
that: 66 mapped options now, from 47.
Window shape and shadows on Appearance: corner shape (rounding_power),
focused and fullscreen opacity, shadow falloff and hard-edged shadows.
Window edges, master layout and Hyprland's own notices on Desktop & Dock.
Three of these are corrections rather than additions.
Master layout options existed nowhere, while Settings has offered "Master
and stack" as a choice since this morning -- a layout you can select and
cannot configure is barely a choice. Its card is hidden unless that
layout is actually selected, since settings that do nothing under the
layout you are running are worse than not offering the layout at all.
The four Hyprland notices -- logo, splash, update news, donation nag --
are all turned off by looks.lua on the user's behalf. Defensible as a
default, but not a decision anyone could reverse. They are stored
positively ("show this") and written as Hyprland's `disable_*` through a
new `invert` flag, because a switch labelled "Disable splash text" that
must be ON to hide something is a small cruelty. The Lua does the same
inversion so both sides agree.
Everything new also reads from prefs in looks.lua. Without that these
would apply live and silently revert on the next compositor reload,
which is the failure this codebase keeps designing against.
Two shapes the write path had never seen. Border colours are gradients
and shadow offsets are vec2, and the verifier understood neither -- it
returned false for anything outside int/bool/float/str/css, so both
would have reported every write as rejected. Gradients also need real
care: the stubs declare them as `string|{colors,angle}`, and the string
form carries only ONE stop, so writing "rgba(a) rgba(b) 45deg" as a
string is accepted and keeps the previous value. Verified that directly.
They are also written in one notation and read back in another
(`{colors={"rgba(3b426199)"},angle=45}` becomes `993b4261 45deg`), so
comparison normalises both sides.
Border COLOUR is deliberately not exposed yet. col.inactive_border is
written by ColorScheme on every scheme change, so a user's choice would
be silently overwritten, and col.active_border is the Prism gradient,
which needs a colour control this app does not have. Shadow offset is
left out for the same reason -- the vec2 support is in place for
whenever the widget exists.
Verified each new option applies and reverts against the live
compositor, and that the schema, enum-map, nav, write and commit/reset
contracts all pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Brings in panama-doctor (a 25-check diagnostic with fixture-backed
contracts), a Health service, a System Health page replacing Startup &
Services, and a bar indicator that stays absent until something is
actually degraded. All seven of its contracts pass on the merge.
Three things needed resolving rather than accepting:
The branch predates the debranding, so its user-visible strings still
named the product -- "Panama desktop is healthy", "Restart Panama",
"Panama tools". Rewritten to say the same thing without the name, which
is what the rest of the app now does.
Its Fedora hand-off card was a single button calling openGnomePanel
("network") under a subtitle naming five subjects. Main had already
replaced that with a row per subject, each opening the panel that owns
it, so those rows are ported into HealthPage instead. Printers and
online accounts stay on Network & Devices with the rest of the network
hardware.
That broke its own assertion, which matched the literal
openGnomePanel("network") string. Rewritten rather than reverted: it now
checks the boundary card exists and that every panel named in HealthPage
is one openGnomePanel actually allows, since a name outside the
allow-list opens nothing at all. Verified it catches a plausible-looking
wrong name.
SettingsShell and SettingsSidebar conflicted because both sides added
pages; resolved as the union, keeping its System Health page and live
footer alongside main's Mouse & Touchpad, Privacy & Security, Region &
Language and Online Accounts.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
GNOME's Wi-Fi panel has this and it is the most-used thing in it: the
alternative is reading a passphrase out loud. Network & Devices now shows
a scannable code for any saved network whose passphrase this user can
read.
The image contains the network password in machine-readable form, so
most of the care here is about that rather than about QR codes. It is
written under XDG_RUNTIME_DIR -- 0700, on tmpfs, gone at logout --
rather than /tmp, which is shared; the file is 0600; the passphrase is
piped to qrencode on stdin rather than passed as an argument, because
argv is world-readable through /proc for as long as the process runs;
and it is never printed or included in an error message. Generated on
demand, because producing a code for every saved network up front means
writing images of passwords nobody asked to see.
Enterprise networks are listed as not shareable rather than offered and
broken: there is no passphrase to encode, so the code could not work.
Two bugs the contract caught while being written. Semicolons in an SSID
were not escaped -- the sed replacement had one backslash where its four
neighbours have two, so sed dropped it, and an SSID containing a
semicolon would have produced a QR code describing a different network.
And nmcli's trailing newline landed inside the payload; it decoded here,
but a newline in the middle of a WIFI: URI is not something every phone
tolerates, and that failure would present as "the QR code just doesn't
work on my phone".
The contract stubs nmcli and qrencode, because the real ones would write
this machine's actual Wi-Fi password into a fixture directory. It
asserts the escaping, the absence of a newline, the file and directory
modes, that no temporary payload survives, and that the passphrase never
reaches argv.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
The page had two settings and a hand-off card claiming GNOME's stack
provided "screen reader, zoom, and on-screen keyboard". Zoom did not
need handing off at all, and the claim about the rest was optimistic.
Zoom is native now. Hyprland has a real magnifier -- cursor:zoom_factor
follows the pointer -- so it is a slider here rather than a button that
opens another application. Inactive windows can also be dimmed as well
as faded, which is the other thing that makes a focused window
unmistakable. 47 mapped compositor options, from 43.
What is NOT here is the more useful half of the change. Sticky keys,
slow keys, bounce keys and mouse keys are AccessX, an X11 SERVER
feature. XKB under Wayland has no accessx option group at all -- checked
against evdev.lst, which lists altwin, caps, compose, ctrl, grp and the
rest, and nothing resembling accessx -- and Hyprland implements none of
it. The compositor will accept "accessx:enable" as a keyboard option and
store it happily; I verified that, and verified nothing acts on it.
So the page says plainly that they are unavailable in this session
rather than offering switches, and does not point at GNOME's panel for
them either: the daemon that would apply those keys is not running here,
so that hand-off would be just as empty. Orca is offered instead, since
the accessibility bus genuinely does work.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
The same Power Saver / Balanced / Performance choice GNOME's Power panel
offers, and the daemon behind it was already running here -- it simply
had no control anywhere in Panama. This machine has been sitting on
"performance" with nothing to say so.
Talks to the net.hadess.PowerProfiles interface rather than to a binary.
Fedora 44 implements it with tuned-ppd instead of power-profiles-daemon,
and powerprofilesctl is not installed at all, so anything shelling out
to that command would have found nothing while the service was right
there. Setting a profile needs no privileges: the daemon accepts a
property write from the active session user.
Not a stored preference. The daemon owns the profile, it survives Panama
restarts, and anything else on the system can change it, so a copy in
settings.json would drift -- the same reasoning as monitor brightness.
PerformanceDegraded is surfaced because it is what makes the setting a
lie: a thermally throttled machine reports "performance" while behaving
otherwise, and that is worth saying out loud.
The contract stubs busctl, because the real daemon is a system service
shared with everything else on the machine and a test that flipped the
daily driver to power-saver and then died would leave it there. It pins
the parsing in particular: busctl renders the Profiles property flat, so
profile names and driver names arrive in one stream, and a pattern loose
enough to match both reports the driver as an extra profile. On this
machine the driver is called "tuned", which reads exactly like a
plausible fourth profile -- verified the contract catches that, and
catches an unvalidated name reaching the system service.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
GNOME Online Accounts is a daemon plus a D-Bus API, and the daemon
already runs in this session -- gvfs activates it, and all four accounts
on this machine work without gnome-shell involved anywhere. Only the
PANEL was GNOME's. The accounts themselves are ordinary D-Bus objects
that anything may read and modify.
So everything except the initial sign-in is now native: the account
list, per-service toggles for mail, calendar, contacts, files, photos,
music and chat, and removal. That is the whole Online Accounts panel
apart from one OAuth handshake.
Signing in is the exception, and only for OAuth providers. The daemon's
AddAccount takes credentials as an argument -- it stores them, it does
not obtain them -- and the code that runs Google's OAuth exchange lives
in libgoa-backend, which Fedora ships without a GIR binding, so it is
reachable from C only. Reimplementing it would mean our own Google
client credentials. That step is handed to GNOME's panel and the page
says so, because a hand-off the user does not expect reads as a bug.
Password-based providers (Nextcloud, IMAP, WebDAV) could be added
natively later; their credential keys are known now.
Accounts needing re-authentication are surfaced first, which turned up
something immediately: both Google accounts on this machine report
attention_needed, meaning their tokens have expired and they have
stopped syncing. GOA has known that all along and nothing outside its
own panel ever said so.
Every write re-reads the account list rather than assuming it landed.
GOA can refuse, and a toggle that springs back is the honest outcome.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
The keyring is already unlocked at sign-in exactly as GNOME does it --
pam_gnome_keyring is in GDM's stack and the journal confirms it works
("gnome-keyring-daemon started properly and unlocked keyring"). So there
was no configuration bug to fix. What a bare Hyprland session lacks is
anywhere to see when that has stopped being true.
It stops being true rarely and expensively. gnome-keyring-daemon crashed
once on this machine -- an upstream abort in service_method_open_session,
with a core dump -- and D-Bus then activated a replacement. That
replacement never received the login password, so the keyring was locked
in the middle of a session that had unlocked it correctly at login.
Nothing announces this. What you see instead is a mail account that will
not authenticate, a git push that cannot find its key, or an integration
reporting "not configured", none of which mention keyrings. That is the
same root cause as the Home Assistant token failure earlier.
Privacy & Security now shows the state, offers an Unlock action that
raises the standard password dialog, and reports when the daemon holding
your secrets is a D-Bus replacement rather than PAM's -- because a
replacement that is currently unlocked was unlocked by hand and will not
survive a restart. The password never passes through Panama.
The contract stubs the secret service rather than touching the real one:
locking the login keyring breaks every saved password on the machine and
can only be undone by typing the password into a dialog, so it is not
something a test suite may do to a daily driver. Verified it catches a
helper that misreports locked as unlocked, and one that crashes instead
of reporting a missing service.
Worth recording: a locked keyring makes a NON-INTERACTIVE caller appear
to hang. It is not hung -- it is waiting on a dialog nobody is looking
at, which is exactly how the earlier secret-tool investigation lost an
hour.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
It is the system settings app for this desktop, so it is named the way
one is. The window is "Settings", the titlebar is "Settings", the
wordmark above the search field is gone, the sidebar's last row is
"About", and the status line reads "Desktop is healthy".
Prose followed the same rule. Forty-odd strings explained what "Panama"
does -- "Panama never animates while idle", "Restore Panama defaults",
"Panama looks in ~/Pictures/Wallpapers" -- which is how a product
describes itself, not how a settings panel describes a setting. They now
say what happens. No user-visible "Panama" remains anywhere in the app.
Two consequences worth naming:
The SUPER+I shortcut's description is user-visible, because the
Shortcuts page is generated from it, so that is renamed too. Rebindings
are keyed by shipped chord rather than description, so no existing
override is orphaned by this.
Three contracts matched the window by title and one matched that
shortcut by description; all four are updated. There are no Hyprland
window rules keyed on the title, so nothing about the window's placement
changes.
The desktop entry is now Name=Settings, but the FILE keeps its
panama-settings name, as does the icon: the dock pins applications by
desktop id, and renaming the file would silently unpin it.
dock-pins-contract covers exactly that.
The dated design docs under docs/superpowers keep the old name. They are
a record of what was decided when, and editing them to agree with the
present would make them lie about the past.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown