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
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
Audited bar, dock, quick settings, date menu and Settings for three
things: a setting reachable in one UI but not another, a setting that
exists but is unreachable anywhere, and UI that states something false.
Night Light was fully exposed in Quick Settings and had no control
anywhere in Settings. It now has a card on Displays, where GNOME also
puts it, with on/off, schedule, times and temperature.
Adding those controls would have shipped the exact defect this audit
exists to find. NightLight declared enabled, temperature and automatic
as bindings on the store, but toggle() assigns to them, and an
assignment destroys a QML binding permanently -- so the service wrote to
the store and never read from it again. The Settings controls would have
written values the service ignored, while Quick Settings kept working.
It now follows the store. Every other service was swept for the same
pattern; this was the only one.
The night light schedule was two hardcoded literals, so the hours could
not be changed. They are schema keys now, with a row that renders 17.5
as "5:30 PM" and honours the 24-hour preference rather than showing a
decimal nobody reads as a time.
keyboardLayout was in the schema and read by input.lua but had no
control anywhere: configurable in principle, unreachable in practice. It
is surfaced on Input & Shortcuts as read-only, with the reason, because
it needs a compositor reload and a control implying instant apply would
be a smaller lie but still a lie.
Caffeine was a Quick Settings toggle mentioned only in a subtitle in
Settings. It has a real control now.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Panama had grown into three configuration surfaces that only agreed because
they had been typed to agree: looks.lua hardcoded values, DesktopPreferences
independently defaulted the same values, and SystemSettings replayed them at
startup. Nothing kept them in sync, and the Lua side read no shared state at
all. This lands the first three stages of docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-17-panama-cohesion.md.
Fix silently failing Hyprland writes. On a Lua-configured Hyprland, hyprctl
keyword refuses the write, prints the refusal to stdout, and still exits 0, so
the HDR, VRR, and direct-scanout toggles persisted their value and reported
success while the compositor never changed. Writes now go through hyprctl eval,
which has the same hazard on syntax and runtime errors, so success is defined
as reading the value back and finding it equal. The existing contract passed
throughout the outage because it re-applied the values already in place; the
new one flips each value to something it does not hold.
Derive preferences from a schema. Every setting used to be restated four times
-- a property alias, a JSON adapter property, a change handler, and a line in
reset -- where omitting any one failed silently. PreferenceSchema.qml is now
the single source, and persistence, validation, reset, and the Hyprland mapping
all derive from it. Unknown keys on disk survive a write so a rollback does not
discard a newer build's settings, and a corrupt file falls back to shipped
defaults. The store moved to ~/.config/panama/settings.json, migrating from the
old state directory without deleting it.
Share that file with Hyprland. prefs.lua reads it at config time with every
shipped literal kept as the fallback, so the config still stands alone. The Lua
is the default, the JSON is the truth, and Settings is the editor. The
compositor-adjustable surface goes from 3 keys to 23.
Also fixes two test-hygiene bugs found by running the suite end to end for the
first time: settings-pages-contract could see the window settings-window-contract
leaves behind, and the new write contract was persisting its deliberately-wrong
values into the user's real store.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown