A machine's role is now the interview's first question and the one answer
Panama records. Servers get the same shell minus the screen: core packages,
nvm, Bun, Claude Code and Codex (desktops get Codex too), linger, rootless
ports from 80, firewalld, the nginx-bridge network, and a nightly image
updater that replaced watchtower for cause.
server/containers/ carries junior's 23 compose services -- secrets moved to
per-machine .env files that never enter this public repo, every transformed
compose proven to render byte-identical to what is live. 'panama server'
enables, disables and relinks them; nothing here restarts a running service.
'boot --server' walks a fresh VPS from its root login to a normal install.
Five new contracts pin the secrets rule, the catalog's shape, panama-server's
behavior, the role plumbing, and the dotfile classification.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NU5JGiN3JfzqrLQB6wmJ1E
Desktop & Dock becomes Shell — Bar, Dock, Control Center, Tiling,
Workspaces — the home for everything Quickshell draws. The settings-
management cluster moves to System as Sync & Backup, Appearance's
Shell tab dissolves, and 24-hour time finally lives on Date & Time,
which always owned it.
The bar gets what it never had: a way to survive the wallpaper. A
second neutral text family (follow theme, or forced light or dark),
a one-layer shadow under every glyph, and a gradient scrim for
wallpapers nothing else survives — all off by default, pixel-identical
until asked. Widgets earn toggles (weather, media, clipboard, calendar
countdown), the vitals cluster stops leaving a dead pill behind, and
Control Center's sections learn to step aside.
The dock graduates from MVP: a context menu with window rows, pin,
unpin, quit and new-window; scroll an icon to cycle its windows; drag
to reorder on the dock itself; hover previews with one-shot captures;
and "Add App to Dock" in the launcher. Three real bugs died en route —
menus that slid away with the autohide, a readonly-property crash on
every menu open, and a drag that drifted half a slot per icon on side
docks. The pinned-apps editor in Settings becomes a drag strip.
166 contracts; the full suite is green except two live display and
switcher tests that cannot run behind a locked session — re-verified
on unlock.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
The audit's fourth tier -- what a Framework owner reaches for in the first
week and found missing.
The power button stops being an instant, unconfirmed poweroff: a shipped
logind drop-in tells the daemon to stand down and the compositor binds the
key to the power menu, the way GNOME turns it into a question. Holding it
still hard-cuts through firmware. change-settings restarts logind so the
change applies without waiting for a boot, and the Power page says what the
button does now.
The function row fills in: F10 (XF86RFKill) toggles airplane mode through a
new panama-osd verb that blocks or unblocks every radio and says which way it
went; F9 (XF86Display) opens the Displays page, the honest action until
mirroring exists. And the lid becomes a switch bind: closing a docked lid
turns the internal panel off so nothing renders inside a closed shell and no
workspace strands on an invisible output, and opening it restores the panel
with the mode and scale chosen in Settings. panama-lid owns both decisions;
undocked machines suspend via logind before any of it matters.
The battery gets an endgame. On battery the screen dims to 30% two-thirds of
the way to blanking -- GNOME's single largest idle battery saver -- and
restores exactly the level it saved. At the urgent threshold the machine
suspends after a fifteen-second grace, cancelled by plugging in, because a
suspend preserves the session for days and a hard cut at 0% preserves
nothing; "Only warn" remains a choice on the Power page. Hibernate joins the
power menu, but only where logind answers CanHibernate with yes -- an entry
that fails silently is worse than none.
And brightness stops being two code paths: the Displays page now embeds the
same control the quick-settings panel uses, so the built-in backlight and
DDC/CI monitors share one surface that withdraws itself where neither
exists. The lid contract narrows to what its principle protects -- a
HandleLidSwitch drop-in -- so deliberate policy for other keys can ship.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
Two bugs, one story: ./install on a machine that had been half set up before
produced no Hyprland at all, and said so in one line among twenty minutes of
scrollback.
Terra bootstraps itself with --repofrompath, which defines a throwaway repo id
just long enough to install terra-release. Run it again on a machine that
already has terra-release and dnf5 refuses the whole transaction -- the
throwaway id collides with the real one. That step sits above everything, so
set -e ended the stage before a single package was considered. It is skipped
now when terra-release is already installed.
The rest is the reason one failed repo cost the desktop. Hyprland was installed
near the bottom of the stage, below a codec swap, two group updates and a
GStreamer glob, any one of which can fail for reasons outside this repository.
It now installs directly after the packages it needs and before anything
optional, and everything fragile below it runs through a soft helper that logs
and continues rather than ending the run. What was stepped over is listed at
the end, because tolerating a failure only beats aborting on it if somebody is
told.
A missing Hyprland is still fatal, and now says so in words.
Also removes the leftover disabled solopasha/hyprland COPR, which would mix
with lionheartp's the moment anyone enabled it while debugging.
Fixes the usage widget reading 1500%: the endpoint reports percentages, not
0..1 fractions. Clamped as well, and the widget answers a click now -- it set
interactive:false, which disables the mouse area its own handler needed.
Agent instructions, skills, SSH host aliases and expansion triggers are worth
having identical on every machine one person owns, and belong in none of the
shared configuration. They live in user/ now, with a manifest saying where each
piece goes and a link-user stage that puts it there.
That stage does nothing unless the machine said yes. Somebody who clones Panama
to try the desktop keeps their own ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md exactly where it was;
the question names the destinations and defaults to no. Anything displaced goes
to config/old rather than being deleted.
~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and ~/.codex/AGENTS.md were byte-identical copies of one
file, which is the drift this exists to prevent.
Also adds the vitals toggles for the battery and Claude usage readouts, which
had preferences and no way to reach them.
Two of Section F.
Hooks are the pressure valve. "Can Panama also do X when the theme
changes" is now a five-line file in ~/.config/panama/hooks rather than
a fork, a feature request, or a patch somebody rebases forever. Each
name takes a single file and a .d directory so several things can react
without fighting over one, and a broken hook is reported and stepped
over: somebody's script must never cost a theme change, an upgrade or a
login. Wired at theme-set, post-upgrade and post-migrate. This is the
thirty-line version of the plugin host the upstream ledger defers, and
it has no API to keep stable beyond "we will run your script and tell
you what happened".
Testing it caught a real bug the reading would not have: run_one
captured the script path but never shifted it off, so every hook got
its own filename as $1 and the real arguments arrived one place late. A
hook reading $1 as the colour scheme got a path.
The crash watcher notices when a program dumps core and says so. Under
GNOME, ABRT does this; here nothing did, and applications died silently,
which is most of how "Linux is flaky" gets earned.
Once per program per session is the entire design, not a nicety. This
machine's portal backend crashes between eleven and sixty times a day,
and a notification per crash would be one every few minutes for
something nobody can act on. The first is news; the fortieth is why
people turn notifications off. The health page keeps the running count.
It waits for the notification server before reporting, because the
crash most worth hearing about is the one that took the shell with it,
and it names the executable rather than the kernel's comm field, which
truncates at fifteen characters. Verified against real segfaults.
Making the plain application keys focus an existing window was the
wrong call. It reads well in a demo and it is what macOS does, but it
made "give me another terminal" the awkward case -- and on a tiling
desktop a second terminal beside the first is the normal way to work,
not an edge case. Reaching for the launcher to open a second file
manager is not an improvement on anything.
So the plain keys do what they always did, and SUPER+ALT is the new
capability rather than a tax on the old one: go to the terminal,
editor, browser, files, calculator or mail you already have, wherever
it is, and start one only if there is none.
ALT rather than SHIFT because SUPER+SHIFT is already the
window-manipulation space -- Files, Neovim and Settings would have
collided with Focus session, Taller and Shorter, and breaking two keys
out of the eight-key resize set to make room is the worse trade.
Also fixes a real trap found while using it. The Alt-Tab overlay
commits on SUPER release, which is a compositor bind running an IPC
call; if that call ever fails to land, the overlay stayed up with no
keyboard focus, no Escape handler and nothing clickable, so the only
way out was an IPC call typed into a terminal it was covering. Clicking
outside now dismisses it, clicking a row switches to that window --
which is the obvious thing to try and did nothing -- and an abandoned
switch closes itself after ten seconds. Keyboard focus still stays with
the compositor, because taking it mid-switch is what would break
stepping.
Right-click a file to send it to your phone, or a video to make it
smaller. macOS has both behind the Share sheet and Quick Actions;
Windows has "Send to"; a stock Linux file manager has neither, and the
usual answer for the second one is a web uploader or an ffmpeg
incantation looked up again every time.
Neither adds machinery. Sending reuses panama-kdeconnect, the same
helper the Home & Phone page and quick settings already drive, so
there is one way to talk to a phone rather than two. The entry appears
only when a phone is actually reachable: an item that is present and
fails is worse than one that is absent, because the absence explains
itself.
The transcoder's two rules are both about not losing work. It never
writes to its input, and it never writes over an earlier output -- a
second run produces -2 rather than eating the first result. Verified
against a real encode: 1920x1080 became 854x480, with an even width
because H.264 rejects an odd one at the very end of a long encode,
which is the worst possible moment to find out.
Menus decide by mime type rather than extension, act on one file at a
time, and refuse anything that is not a local path. nautilus-python
turned out to be declared already; it now says it carries Panama's own
extensions too.
Two of Section E's small wins.
panama-webapp gives a site its own icon, its own window with no browser
chrome, and its own launcher entry, which is most of what "installed"
means in practice and what both macOS and Windows now ship. It scrapes
the site's apple-touch-icon, falls back twice, and never fails an
install over a favicon: a web app with a generic icon still works.
Names are slugged, so "../../../../tmp/pwn" lands inside the
applications directory as tmp-pwn rather than anywhere else, and
remove refuses anything without the marker it writes -- sharing a name
with a real application must not delete that application. A browser
that cannot do app mode is told so rather than handed something that
opens an ordinary window and pretends.
The charger now announces itself through StatusEvents, which was
already the right layer and only wanted a producer. Ambient priority,
so Do Not Disturb quiets it, because a charger is exactly what DND is
for. A critically low battery is published at a priority DND does not
silence, because the one message you must not miss is the one saying
the machine is about to stop. Both join the existing silent-startup
window rather than announcing the state they found.
The keyboard-layout toast the plan also listed is deliberately not
built. Hyprland exposes the active keymap but not a change event
Quickshell already consumes, so it would need either polling or new
event plumbing, and this machine has one layout and could not test it.
The application keys ran their command unconditionally, so pressing the
browser key twice gave you two browsers. That is the single most common
"Linux feels wrong" moment and it is a twenty-line fix: match the
window class, focus it if it is there, launch if it is not.
Two details the obvious version gets wrong. Patterns are anchored,
because an unanchored "mail" matches gmail-notifier and the mail key
would raise somebody's notifier. And class alone is not enough here:
the terminal and the editor are both kitty, so the editor bind narrows
by title or it raises whatever terminal happened to be open. The
contract's fixture contains both traps.
Found and fixed a bug this shipped with earlier today. Hyprland 0.56
dispatches through Lua, so `hyprctl dispatch focuswindow address:0x...`
is parsed as Lua source and fails with a syntax error -- which is what
the launcher's Switch Window command had been doing since it landed.
Its own contract stubbed hyprctl and recorded the arguments, so the
call looked correct and never ran. Both now use the selector form
hl.focus actually accepts, and the contract asserts the shape rather
than only that something was dispatched.
logind handles the lid correctly except for the one case it cannot
see: an external display means a closed lid is a docked machine, not
one being put away. Its own docked test looks for an ACPI docking
station that modern hardware does not have.
Panama does not take the lid over to fix that. It holds a logind
handle-lid-switch inhibitor while an external display is connected and
releases it when the last one goes, which needs no lid watcher, no
polling, and no drop-in. The direction it fails in is the point: if the
guard dies, logind's default comes back and a docked laptop suspends,
which is annoying. A drop-in setting HandleLidSwitch=ignore plus a
watcher of our own fails the other way, leaving a lid that does nothing
at all on a machine being carried out of a building.
Locking on the way down needed no work: hypridle's before_sleep_cmd
already runs loginctl lock-session, so a lid-close suspend is a locked
suspend. The contract fails anything that duplicates it.
Not yet verified against a real lid, which is stated in the helper's
header rather than implied by silence. The decision logic, the
inhibitor's shape, and every machine that should hold none of it are
covered.
Panama had no idea whether it was running on a laptop. No upower, no
battery, no lid, no AC: hypridle.conf says "This is a desktop" in its
own header, and that was true of the code as well as the machine.
panama-hw answers hardware questions one at a time, exits 0 or 1, and
prints nothing, so scripts, services and contracts all ask the same
way. The definition the rest of the laptop work hangs on is one line:
clamshell is lid-closed AND an external monitor. A machine with no
mains supply at all reports as being on wall power, because a desktop
cannot run out of it.
The battery service follows Vitals: sysfs through FileView, an
availability flag, and no subprocess on the timer. Globbing is the one
thing QML cannot do -- a battery is BAT0 or BAT1 or CMB0, mains is AC
or ADP1 or ACAD -- so panama-battery resolves the names once and the
shell reads the files directly after. Nothing falls back to a
plausible zero: a desktop shows no indicator, no card, and no charge
limit control where the firmware has no ceiling.
Also repairs two contracts that were already failing and had not been
noticed, because only the full suite runs them. The dependency
scanner treated line-initial variable assignments, case labels,
comments and heredoc bodies as commands, and `count`, `host`, `cancel`
and `import` are all real binaries on Fedora, so `command -v` could
not filter them out. It now drops comments and heredoc bodies and
requires a command to be followed by whitespace. Verified it still
catches a genuinely undeclared dependency rather than passing quietly.
The launcher command contract had not been told about the fourteen
commands added earlier today.
./install only ever adds. It copies over /, links dotfiles, installs
packages -- and has no way to say "remove that file", "disable that
unit", "that symlink points nowhere now". So a machine set up months
ago keeps whatever this repository has since decided was wrong, and
the only thing that ever fixes it is somebody reading a commit
message. With a curl installer in the README, that stopped being
hypothetical.
A migration is one script that performs one repair, exactly once, on
the machines that need it. Named by the commit timestamp that authored
it, so glob order is chronological without a sequence number two
branches could both pick. Marked in ~/.local/state on success and only
on success, so a repair that failed stays pending rather than being
recorded as done and hidden forever. Ordered, and stopped at the first
failure, because a later repair may assume an earlier one landed. A
fresh install marks everything without running it, the way
Migrations.qml stamps a pre-versioning settings file at its baseline.
The first real one removes the dangling ~/.config/forge symlink left
behind when the GNOME session was cut: link-dotfiles could link it but
never unlink it. Verified both ways -- a no-op on a machine that never
had it, an actual repair on one that did.
Root work goes through panama-sudo --reason so the password prompt
names the repair, and the contract fails any migration reaching for
bare sudo.
The launcher's Copy Password command, built alone and last as the plan
required, because every line of it is the security design: the secret
travels rbw to wl-copy through a pipe -- never argv, never a file --
and the copy carries wl-clipboard's --sensitive hint, which vicinae's
clipboard history documents it ignores. That claim was not taken on
faith: a plain probe landed in the live history database and a
sensitive one did not, before any of this was written. A transient
timer clears the clipboard after thirty seconds. An unconfigured rbw
gets a setup message; a vault that locks between list and get gets an
honest failure instead of an empty copy claiming success. rbw joins
desktop-packages, and the contract pins the whole journey with a stub
vault, including that the secret never appears on a command line.
The OS-parity batch from the vicinae plan, tasks 1 through 7. The audit
came back better than the plan guessed: the calculator already links
libqalculate, the built-in file index answers in under 100ms across all
of home, quicklinks and snippets ship as built-in stores -- so zero new
packages, and `vicinae dmenu` replaces the planned compiled extension
outright. What was missing gets built: a power menu (lock, suspend, log
out through uwsm, restart, power off), reminders as transient systemd
timers with a pick-to-cancel list, a color picker over hyprpicker, and
dmenu pick-lists for window switching, force quit, kill process, SSH
hosts, and recent files -- all through one panama-pick helper. The
launcher commands contract exercises the reminder parsing and every
pick-list against stubs, including killing its own sacrificial sleep.
`boot` is the script the README now leads with: curl it, and it installs
git if the machine lacks it, clones the repository to PANAMA_PATH, and
hands off to ./install -- reattaching the terminal first, because a
piped stdin would strand the interview. Deliberately dumb: a curled copy
leaves the repository the moment it runs, so nothing that can drift
lives in it. Re-running is the recovery path: an existing clone is
fast-forwarded, never re-cloned, and a refused fast-forward installs
from what is there rather than stopping mid-repair. All of it pinned by
the boot contract, against stub git and a throwaway clone.
Four installer bugs, all in the space between exit codes and intent:
- A flatpak-only extras category -- most of them -- died at the grep
that filters out its dnf half, because grep exits 1 on zero matches
and set -e read that as failure. sed deletes lines without editorial
comment. The extras contract now runs a flatpak-only category under
the installer's own strict options so this stays fixed.
- A rate-limited GitHub API call aborted the whole package stage while
resolving the RustDesk URL, even though the empty-result fallback was
sitting right below it. The pipeline is now guarded so the fallback
is reachable.
- Ctrl-C did not stop the install: the INT trap ran cleanup and bash
carried on with the remaining stages, MOK enrollment and firmware
included. INT and TERM now exit explicitly; cleanup rides EXIT.
- change-settings and link-dotfiles ran without set -e, so a failed
copy over / or a failed symlink fell through to guarded no-ops and
the stage reported success. Turning strictness on immediately caught
what it had been hiding: link-dotfiles never created ~/.config, so on
a truly fresh HOME every symlink was failing silently.
Gabriel Brown