Commit Graph
151 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Gabriel Brown 153554b5df Make ./install something you could hand a stranger
The audit's third tier: everything between this installer and a fresh machine
it has never met.

The one path that could cost a person their display: the interview probes
Secure Boot with mokutil, which install-packages had not installed yet, so on
a minimal base the MOK question silently never fired -- and install-hardware
still installed akmod-nvidia and blacklisted nouveau, arming a reboot into an
unloadable driver with its fallback disabled. The probe tools (pciutils,
mokutil, fwupd) now bootstrap beside gum, and install-hardware re-checks
Secure Boot for itself and refuses the driver rather than the display.

Secrets leave the checkout: the personal environment moves to
~/.config/panama/env at mode 600 by migration, and .bashrc sources it with a
permission check that quietly re-tightens drift. change-settings no longer
overwrites /etc/dnf/dnf.conf -- two performance keys are set additively, the
defaultyes=True that made every `dnf remove` treat Enter as yes is gone, and
a migration strips it from machines that already received it.

Package installation survives the world changing: the initial and desktop
lists run with --skip-unavailable and a report_missing pass that names what
was skipped (resolved through --whatprovides, so capability names like awk
do not cry wolf); the openh264, appstream and core-group extras go through
soft; RustDesk resolves its RPM for the machine's own architecture; and the
Claude Desktop repository script is fetched to a kept file and run, never
piped from the network into root.

The hardware predicates stop guessing: a wireless mouse's scope=Device
battery no longer turns a tower into a laptop, USB-PD-only machines read
their power state from the battery's own status instead of being permanently
"on AC", the lid falls back to logind's LidClosed where ACPI is silent, and
charge limits reach every pack of a two-battery machine in one authorization
-- with the reported percentage summed across packs.

And the parsers stop assuming this machine: snapper is read through
--machine-readable csv with named columns instead of a localized box-drawing
table, and reports whether snapshots are even possible so ext4 and
unconfigured-btrfs stop looking identical; fprintd is parsed under LC_ALL=C;
the hypridle drop-in resolves the binary it points at; the recorder's render
node became an "auto" token resolved at record time; update-grub writes the
config its firmware actually boots; the nvm prompt hook and the SSH tmux
takeover are guarded; hipblas and rocm-opencl move to an opt-in gpu-compute
category; and the two interactive python tools' libraries are declared.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
2026-08-23 12:10:03 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 44124d72fa Take one machine's fingerprints off everyone's desktop
The audit's second tier: values that were measurements of the author's
desktop, shipped to every machine as if they were defaults.

Settings greeted every human as Gabriel; it now greets whoever
accountsservice says is signed in, and nobody when it says nothing. The
weather shipped his home coordinates and confidently reported his forecast
anywhere on earth; it now ships unset, fetches nothing until a location is
chosen, and the location row says so. The GTK bookmarks carried seven
/home/gib paths and his file server into every file dialog; they are now
generated per machine from a template and gitignored -- Nautilus edits the
instance freely, the way settings.ini already worked one file over. Web
search routed through his personal bang redirector; the engine is now the
webSearchUrl preference with a DuckDuckGo default, read by both the script
command and the suggestions extension, which the launcher-search contract
already pins to one another. The GPU vitals path defaulted to his card1 and
lost the readout on any machine enumerated differently; a machine with
exactly one GPU now adopts it. And the Containers and Snapshots pages hide
once a scan proves their backing stack absent, instead of rendering
permanently empty on machines that never had podman or snapper.

Lesser residue swept in the same pass: the DP-2 hyprpaper block one machine
needed, the author's username-typo expansions (moved to his personal seed in
user/, where personal content belongs), a capture fallback into /home/gib,
and a parity table asserting one machine's hardware as fact.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
2026-08-23 11:55:43 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 3d21e20041 Make every control tell the truth
The audit's first tier, in one change: every case found where the interface
asserted something the system did not do.

Twenty-one compositor-owned preferences -- the whole Mouse & Touchpad page,
plus window layout, snapping, dim-inactive and the magnifier -- had the live
half (hyprctl eval) and not the config-time half, so they quietly reverted on
every hyprctl reload. All 70 hypr-backed keys now have a prefs.get() in the
Lua, and hypr-prefs-contract pins both the presence and that the Lua fallback
equals the schema default, which is how the touchpad page misreported natural
scrolling on first boot.

The idle generator fell back from unwritten battery keys to the AC values
while the Power page displayed the schema defaults: a fresh laptop showed
"suspend at 20 minutes" and generated no suspend listener, then discharged to
zero in a bag. Unwritten keys now use the defaults the page shows
(idle-defaults-contract pins generator to schema; idle-config-contract
re-pinned to the new rule with the tradeoff recorded), and change-settings
enables managed idle on any machine with a battery -- without starting
hypridle in whatever session the installer runs under.

The per-app lock-screen notification switches wrote fields nothing read:
hyprlock cannot render notifications. Removed, with the rule model shrunk to
{enabled}, stale stored fields dropped at normalization, and the contract now
forbidding the page from growing lock-screen switches it cannot honor.

The battery warning thresholds were searchable, documented as "Found on
Power & Lock", and rendered nowhere -- and crossing the low threshold changed
only a glyph's color. Both sliders now exist where search was already sending
people, and low battery publishes a real notification at important priority.

Three handoffs opened GNOME panels that are inert in a Hyprland session. The
keyboard handoff is gone (that panel writes gsettings nothing here reads, and
the working controls sat on the same page); Connectivity gains a Wi-Fi row
that opens GNOME's actual Wi-Fi panel -- hidden SSIDs and 802.1X finally have
a road -- beside the network row that legitimately drives NetworkManager; the
universal-access handoff is gone, its few working toggles being controls this
app already owns. And the accessibility page now gives the true reason sticky
keys are missing: each Wayland compositor implements its own and Hyprland
does not yet -- not "an X11 feature with no Wayland equivalent," which sent
people to the wrong conclusion about the platform.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
2026-08-23 11:43:39 -04:00
Gabriel Brown dfc0c49877 Let the laptop say what it is doing: battery percentage, the lid, a fingerprint
Three surfaces the first laptop install showed were missing.

The bar's battery icon gets an optional exact number beside it -- GNOME's
"Show Battery Percentage", off by default for GNOME's reason, one color with
the icon so it reads as one indicator.

The Power page says what closing the lid does. The policy already existed
(LidPolicy holds a suspend inhibitor while an external display is connected)
but was surfaced nowhere, so the machine's most physical behavior was
undiscoverable -- and the deliberate absence of an override deserves stating
rather than leaving someone to hunt for a switch that does not exist.

And the Users page grows a Fingerprint card, because fingerprint login is two
systems that fail silently when they disagree: fprintd holds the enrolled
prints, authselect decides whether PAM ever asks the reader. This machine
arrived with a finger enrolled from its GNOME days and with-fingerprint off,
which reads as "the reader is broken". The card shows both facts, flips the
authselect feature through polkit with a stated reason, and hands enrollment
to GNOME's Users panel, which owns the only good capture dialog -- a named
exception in the handoff contract. Everything through scripts/panama-fingerprint,
pinned by a stub-driven contract.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
2026-08-23 11:07:37 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 36fdd4e076 Give the VPN a toggle, an indicator, and a way back
Turning on a WireGuard profile whose server was unreachable used to cost the
whole network stack, and the only way out was nmcli typed into a terminal.
Quickshell's Networking module has no VPN surface, so this arrives as the one
sanctioned nmcli exception: a helper that lists, raises and lowers profiles,
a service that watches NetworkManager for changes made anywhere, a quick
settings tile (left-click toggles the most recently used profile, right-click
picks among them), and a bar glyph while a tunnel is up.

The safety property is in the helper, where it cannot be skipped: activation
waits a bounded 25 seconds, and a failure is rolled back down and reported
instead of leaving a black-hole default route. The contract pins exactly that,
against a stateful stub NetworkManager.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
2026-08-23 10:32:17 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 8b96d907a1 Show how much of the subscription is gone, without risking the session
The last of Section F, and the only thing in Panama that reads an
authentication token, so most of the design is about that rather than
about the number.

It never refreshes the token and never writes to the credentials file.
That token expires roughly hourly and Claude Code refreshes it on
demand; if this refreshed it too, two processes would be rotating one
credential, and a rotation invalidates the other holder's copy. The
failure mode is being silently signed out of Claude Code by a status
widget, which no bar indicator is worth. So it reads the token, uses it
while valid, and reports "waiting for Claude Code to refresh" when not
-- which covers the case that matters, because while you are using
Claude Code the token is fresh, and while you are not there is nothing
to watch.

The token never reaches argv either: curl takes the Authorization
header on stdin through --config, because a header passed as an
argument sits in /proc/<pid>/cmdline for the length of the request.
Same rule the password and MOK paths already follow. And it never
reaches the output: the record carries percentages and timestamps and
nothing else. Both are pinned, and both were checked by sabotaging the
collector to pass -H and watching the contract name it.

Off by default. It is a coding-tool readout, not something a
general-purpose desktop shows without being asked, and it hides unless
the collector has real numbers rather than displaying "unknown".
2026-08-22 08:33:39 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 8d66247b7c Open a new one with SUPER, go to the old one with SUPER+ALT
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.
2026-08-22 07:22:09 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 05fd5346db Turn a website into an application, and notice the charger
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.
2026-08-22 06:33:19 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 202b5b89ac Write the manual for the person using the desktop
docs/ is engineering artifacts -- design specs, plans, an upstream
ledger -- and none of it is written for the person who has to live
here. Five chapters that are: coming from another desktop, the
keyboard, windows and workspaces, when something breaks, and making it
yours.

Rendered inside Settings rather than opened in a browser, so a chapter
that says "the Displays page reverts after fifteen seconds" is one
click from the Displays page. Qt's markdown renderer does the work;
one chapter per Text, because Text has an implicit texture size limit
and a document long enough to hit it goes blank rather than
complaining.

The chapters live beside the shell in manual/ rather than at the
repository root, which departs from the plan. The reason is the path:
the shell finds them through Quickshell.shellDir, which is correct
wherever the repository is, whereas walking upward out of the shell
directory is only correct by accident. The contract fails that pattern
if it comes back.

The contract also pins the set both ways -- every chapter listed
exists, every chapter that exists is listed -- because a renamed file
shows an error card where a chapter should be, which reads as a broken
manual rather than as a moved file.
2026-08-22 01:11:46 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 9202697734 Introduce the desktop to somebody who has just met it
Thirty settings pages is the opposite of the usual problem: a person
arriving from GNOME, macOS or Windows cannot tell which few things
matter. This is those few, once, on the first start.

Not a tour. Nobody reads a tour, and a multi-step wizard on a desktop
somebody just installed is one more thing between them and using it.
One card, five keys, and a way out.

The chords come from the live keymap rather than being written here, so
a machine whose owner has already rebound something teaches what they
actually have. A welcome screen is the one surface read by somebody
with no way to tell it is wrong, which is exactly why it must not be.

Two deliberate departures from how every other surface behaves. It does
not close on a click outside, because a stray click in the first thirty
seconds would throw away the only explanation on offer. And dismissing
by any route marks it seen, Escape included, because a desktop that
reintroduces itself every login has failed to take no for an answer.
It stays reachable from the launcher afterwards, since the moment
somebody wants it again is exactly when a one-shot has thrown it away.

Also teaches the keymap to spell punctuation: slash, period, comma and
the rest were rendering as their raw keysym names, so the welcome
screen offered "Super + slash" and the cheatsheet agreed with it.
2026-08-22 01:00:18 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 9fbbdd902b Answer "what can I press" in one keypress
The Shortcuts settings page answers "how do I change this", which is
worth opening a window for. This answers the other question, the one
you have with your hands already on the keyboard, so it is an overlay
on SUPER + / and the same key closes it.

It reads Keybinds.grouped() rather than a written-down list, so a
shortcut rebound in Settings shows its new chord here with nothing kept
in sync. A cheatsheet that lies is worse than none: it gets consulted
exactly when somebody does not already know.

Three columns, balanced by how many shortcuts each category holds. The
first attempt used a Flow, which wraps into as many columns as it likes
and made 120 binds across six uneven categories unreadable; it also
sized the card from a child that filled it, which is a circular binding
and produced a card taller than the display with its contents running
off the bottom. Both were found by looking at it rather than by a test,
which is the argument for looking at it.

Fixes a real bug on the way past: luaChord and formatChord appended the
key unconditionally, so the window switcher's modifier-only release
bind became "SUPER + " with a dangling separator. That matched neither
the chord keybinds.lua binds nor the one an override is keyed by, so
that bind could never be rebound and had no category -- it was sitting
in a seventh group of its own, which is how it was noticed.
2026-08-21 23:53:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 6ae8265730 Say what a keybind is for, rather than guessing from its name
The Shortcuts page grouped shortcuts by matching substrings in their
descriptions, which put "Close window" and "Close the notification
list" in the same group and left anything phrased unusually in
whichever bucket matched first. The cheatsheet that comes next would
have inherited the same guesswork.

keybinds.lua says it outright now. Its sections already were the
categories, so a section sets one and the binds below inherit it: one
line per section instead of one per bind, and a new bind lands in the
category of the section somebody wrote it in without having to
remember anything.

Hyprland reports a Lua bind's dispatcher as __lua with a bytecode
offset, so nothing can be attached to a bind that survives into
`hyprctl binds`. The config writes a manifest at load instead, keyed
by the chord actually bound so the shell can join on what it sees.
Writing never raises: a read-only state directory costs the grouping,
never the keymap, and the shell keeps the old derivation as its
fallback so a machine that has not reloaded its compositor still works.

The one failure mode is a section that forgets to set a category and
silently inherits the one above. That is not hypothetical -- it
happened while writing this, because the dictation section sits in the
middle of the media binds and its category leaked onto the volume,
media and brightness keys below it. The contract walks the file for
sections with binds and no category, and spot-checks the boundaries
where inheritance is doing the work.
2026-08-21 23:30:36 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 317b7a0962 Give a reconnected display the arrangement it had
hypr/monitors.lua applies the stored per-output entries when the
compositor reads its config, and never again. A monitor plugged in an
hour later got the compositor's automatic placement instead of the
position, scale and rotation this machine was told to use, and the
only way back was to open Settings and apply it again. Docking should
not cost you your desk.

Deliberately not a confirmed transaction. applyLayout arms a fifteen
second countdown because it is about to show you something you might
not be able to undo; this restores a layout you already confirmed, on
hardware you already had, and a countdown would be asking you to
re-approve your own decision every time you sat down.

It refuses rather than guesses when the stored mode is one the
connected panel does not offer -- DP-1 on one dock is not DP-1 on
another -- and when the surviving layout would name no primary. Both
land on the compositor's automatic placement plus a toast that opens
the Displays page, which is recoverable; silence would not be. That
toast needed a new open-settings verb in StatusEvents, whose page name
goes through ShellState's existing allow-list.

The decision is split from the action as plannedRestore so it can be
tested without driving a real compositor, and the harness sets topology
and stored arrangement in one call because a real query landing between
two would replace the fixture. Both fixtures travel base64: qs ipc call
splits a JSON array of several objects into one argument per object,
so a two-monitor fixture was arriving as an extra argument.
2026-08-21 23:06:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 50a99a5ad0 Closing the lid at a desk is not closing it in a bag
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.
2026-08-21 22:36:36 -04:00
Gabriel Brown bc6d63b70f Let the idle timings know whether you are plugged in
An idle screen costs a screen on wall power and the rest of your
afternoon on battery, so they should not be the same number. hypridle
has no concept of a power source -- one config, one set of timeouts --
so rather than maintaining two configs and swapping them, panama-idle
builds the single config from whichever key set applies, and IdleLock
rebuilds it when the charger comes or goes. That runs through the same
400ms debounce a settings change uses, so a loose charger cannot
restart hypridle in a loop.

The battery keys fall back to their AC counterparts rather than to the
schema defaults. Without that, unplugging would silently override a
deliberately long timing with a shipped short one, which is the kind
of thing you would notice only by losing work.

A machine with no battery reads none of it and generates exactly what
it generated before. The contract pins that alongside the two obvious
directions, and was checked by sabotaging the detection to confirm it
fails rather than passing vacuously.
2026-08-21 22:18:29 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 3c359f3f7e Notice the battery, and the machine it is or is not in
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.
2026-08-21 21:43:14 -04:00
Gabriel Brown f42b3cfe0e Let the password prompt say why
panama-sudo is pkexec with a stated reason: the reason travels to the
shell over the existing polkit IPC target, and the prompt renders it
labeled "Stated reason (unverified)" beside polkitd's real action
message -- beside, never instead of, because any process can claim any
reason and the action text is the trust anchor. Reasons are single-shot
and expire in ten seconds, so a stale one cannot dress up an unrelated
prompt; without a reason, a running shell, or qs the wrapper is exactly
pkexec. Built for agents, so the person typing their password learns
what for. Verified live end to end -- reason shown, consumed once,
expired when stale, cleared on dismissal -- and pinned by the polkit
reason contract.
2026-08-21 18:57:26 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 185d7edaa5 Open the windows you open together, together
Arrange the desktop, run "Save Layout as Project" from the launcher, name it.
"Open Project" lays it out again on free workspaces, so it never lands on top of
what you are already doing. Saved layouts are listed on the Desktop settings
page, which is where they are removed.

Recorded rather than written by hand, and a terminal's directory is most of why
it is worth having: without it a project opens three terminals in your home
folder and you change directory three times. This machine had two terminals in
the same project when it was written, and reopening there is the difference
between a layout and a working desktop.

Four things had to be found by running it, none of which reading would have
shown.

A terminal's directory is not the terminal's working directory -- that is where
it was launched from. The shell inside it is what has been cd'd. Reading the
wrong one looked correct for exactly as long as the terminals under test had
been started from the right place, which they had.

gtk-launch cannot place a window. It activates over D-Bus, so the process
Hyprland started exits and a [workspace N silent] rule has nothing left to apply
to; Nautilus landed on whatever workspace was in front of you. The Exec line
from the desktop entry is run directly instead. But DBusActivatable
applications do the same thing regardless, so the window is found afterwards and
moved by address -- which also means a window that never appeared is reported
rather than assumed.

/proc/PID/task/PID/children is a file of pids, not a directory. Listing it as
one always raised, so the fast path was never once taken and everything went
through pgrep.

And kitty's --directory needs an equals sign or the short -d; the
space-separated long form is accepted and silently ignored.

The contract exercises a save and open round trip against a stubbed compositor,
and reads a terminal's directory out of a real process tree rather than grepping
the source for a shell name -- an earlier version passed against a helper that
had been changed back, because the constant was still there.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 13:45:16 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 538c0a887c Save things where the rest of the software already saves them
Screenshots and recordings offered three folders to choose between, and three
guesses cannot include the folder somebody's other software already writes to --
which is the only folder that matters. This machine has had ~/Pictures/Screenshots
and ~/Videos/Screencasts since long before Panama, and Panama was writing
recordings to a Videos/Recordings it invented. Both are free text now, and the
recording default is the folder that was already there.

Wallpapers were swept from four directories at once, so the distribution's stock
images arrived mixed in with the user's own and there was no way to ask for just
one. Where wallpapers live is something somebody knows about their own machine.
It is a setting, not a search.

All three accept an absolute path as well as one relative to home, which meant
fixing Capture: it prefixed $HOME unconditionally, so naming /mnt/captures would
have written screenshots to ~/mnt/captures and left nobody able to find them.

The generator turned out to skip any entry whose comment sits inside the braces
rather than above them -- it looks for `key:` immediately after `{`. Three
settings were invisible in the reference because of it, one of them dockScreens,
which has never appeared there at all. The staleness contract could not see it
either: regenerating reproduced the same omission, so the copy was current and
incomplete at once. It now counts what was declared against what it could read
and refuses rather than quietly documenting less than exists.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 12:57:47 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 7cd4131327 Hold a key, speak, and the words are typed
Super+D holds the microphone open, releasing it transcribes on the GPU and
types the result wherever the cursor is. Roughly 150ms for a normal utterance
once the model is resident, measured rather than hoped for.

Getting there meant discarding two approaches. Fedora 44 cannot install any
GPU-capable Whisper for Python -- openai-whisper needs a numba that needs an
llvmlite that does not exist for 3.14, and faster-whisper needs a ctranslate2
nobody packaged. The whisper-cpp package IS built with HIP but ships libraries
with no binary and no bindings, and hand-writing ctypes for a large by-value
struct is a segfault waiting for a version bump. So a container, as suggested.

Vulkan rather than ROCm, and upstream's image rather than one built here. ROCm
is seven gigabytes and serves AMD alone; Vulkan compute runs on the AMD, Intel
and NVIDIA machines this config is used on, in a twentieth of the space. The
Vulkan tag already contains whisper-server, so there is no Containerfile to keep
working -- an earlier draft of this commit had one, and it was strictly worse.

Two bugs found by using it rather than by reading it. Whisper describes silence
as the literal text "[BLANK_AUDIO]", and the first working version pasted that
string into the clipboard; a transcription that is nothing but such markers is
now discarded. And the server answers with a line per segment, which typed into
a window is an Enter press -- sending the half-written message, submitting the
form. Whitespace is collapsed to one line.

Neither the image nor the model is installed by ./install. Together they are
over two gigabytes that want the network, and Settings offers both as one
action instead. Nothing starts at login either: whisper-server holds the model
from the moment it starts, so the first press of the key is what brings it up.

The contract pins both text bugs, that the server stays on loopback, and that it
does not start at login. Reverting the [BLANK_AUDIO] guard did not fail it at
first -- the check was still correct, it had simply stopped being called -- so
it now checks the call site too.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 12:22:19 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 4c77bc2f61 Decide whether the other screens join in on workspaces
GNOME's Multitasking panel asked one workspace question worth reproducing, and
it is not which workspace goes on which screen. It is whether the second screen
participates at all: workspaces on the primary display only, or each screen with
its own. Ten rows of per-workspace assignment would be more powerful and worse.

Off is Hyprland's own behaviour and emits nothing. On pins workspaces 1 to 10 --
however many ALT+1..ALT+0 actually reach, read from keybinds.lua rather than
written down twice -- to whichever output is recorded as primary. With no
primary recorded, nothing is pinned: guessing one would move every workspace
onto whichever output happened to sort first, and this machine is in exactly
that state.

Applying is a reload, which is the part that shaped the design. Hyprland reads
workspace rules at config time and will not remove one afterwards -- a rule
written with an empty monitor keeps its old binding, which was checked rather
than assumed. Only a reload clears them, so the config is the only honest source
and the page cannot pretend a change has landed before one happens. Hence a
service that reads `hyprctl workspacerules` back rather than inferring success
from having written the preference, and a Reload row that exists only while the
two disagree.

Verified end to end against the live compositor and put back: off emits nothing,
on emits ten rules naming the primary, and turning it off clears them. The
settings file came back byte-identical.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 02:16:29 -04:00
Gabriel Brown ed428e87c4 Complete the Panama theme system 2026-08-20 22:03:08 -04:00
Gabriel Brown c4642919f7 Close desktop safety gaps 2026-08-20 22:00:26 -04:00
Gabriel Brown e1faaf7a76 Drop the extension, and give the test suite a front door
Phase 6, the last of the fresh-install spec.

159 scripts lose their .sh: 110 contracts, 47 Vicinae commands, 2 compositor
contracts. A shebang and the executable bit already select the interpreter. The
extension only ever added something that had to stay in sync, and the rename
proved the point twice over in the space of an hour.

The spec's stated risk was Vicinae's script discovery. One script was renamed and
reloaded on its own before the other 46 followed; it came back as
scripts:panama.capture and all 47 resolve. What the probe turned up instead is
that the extension was never only a filename: Vicinae's command IDs embed it, so
every ID changed. Nothing in this repository refers to them, so nothing breaks.
The only trace is Vicinae's metadata.json, whose visited map had two Panama
entries that are now orphaned -- two commands lost their usage ranking and will
earn it back. Worth knowing before anyone renames these again on a machine that
has a keybind pointing at one.

Rewriting the references by exact filename missed two things it structurally
could not see: a name built from a variable, settings-$page.sh, and a glob,
-name '*.sh'. Both were in the contract that counts the generated commands, which
promptly reported 47 expected and 0 found. The mechanical part of a rename is the
part that looks finished.

The three subcommands. panama doctor fronts a health check that already existed
and already ran at the end of every install but could not be reached from a
terminal. panama upgrade re-runs the installer from anywhere. panama test runs
the suite, which had no entry point at all -- 121 files that were the main safety
net in this repository and were invisible in it.

Writing that runner found three tests nothing was running.
calendar_agenda_bridge_test, home_assistant_bridge_test and kdeconnect_bridge_test
are unittest suites without the executable bit, so no contract invoked them and
the first draft of the runner skipped them silently. All three pass, and have
passed unobserved for weeks. The runner collects *_test.py as well now, because a
runner with a blind spot is worse than no runner for the same reason a dependency
checker with one is: it reports PASS.

Six worktrees pruned. Each was re-checked rather than trusted to the spec's list,
and two needed it: panama-commands is not on feat/panama-commands but on
feat/gnome-tweaks-parity, and fix/panama-displays-review reads [ahead 3] -- ahead
of its remote, not of main, with every commit patch-equivalent to landed work.
roadmap-completion stays; it has five commits that are genuinely unlanded. The
branches are left alone: pruning a worktree costs nothing, deleting a branch is a
decision.

121 contracts pass.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
2026-08-20 21:55:55 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 495fb9b41b Give each online account its provider's icon
Four accounts distinguished only by a line of small grey text are four rows that
have to be read rather than recognised. GOA already knows what each one is.

It hands back a serialised GThemedIcon -- ". GThemedIcon goa-account-google
goa-account goa …" -- a preference-ordered fallback chain. The helper passes the
whole chain on rather than resolving it, because which of those names exists is
a property of the icon theme in use and not something a python script talking to
D-Bus should be deciding.

The page walks the chain and takes the first name the active theme actually has.
Both simpler readings were wrong and looked right: taking the first name blindly
assumes it resolves, and taking the last as a fallback assumes the most generic
name is the most likely to exist. On Adwaita the tails of these very chains --
"mail", "goa-symbolic" -- do not exist at all, so a miss would have drawn
nothing. Checked by asking Quickshell.iconPath directly, which returns empty for
a name the theme lacks; the fallback is avatar-default-symbolic, which is
present.

SettingsCard grew an optional icon for this. It is empty by default and the
header lays out exactly as before when unset, so no other card moves.

Last-sync is not here because there is nothing to show: GOA exposes no
sync-related property at all, on any of these accounts. Better to say so than to
invent a timestamp from when the page last refreshed.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 13:28:05 -04:00
Gabriel Brown c148bae4ac Let Ethernet be switched off and on
Wi-Fi had a switch and wired did not, which left no way to take the cable down
without reaching for nmcli -- and this machine has two interfaces on one subnet,
so turning one off is a genuinely useful thing to be able to do.

Both halves are needed to turn it off. Disconnecting alone survives the session
but not a carrier event or a reboot, because NetworkManager brings an
autoconnecting device straight back; the switch sets the device's autoconnect
alongside it. The device property rather than the connection profile, so a
toggle here does not quietly rewrite a saved connection somebody expects to come
up at boot.

The first version built a trap door. It decided whether the switch was usable
from hasLink, which reads false while a device is merely disconnected even
though NetworkManager still reports the carrier as on -- so turning Ethernet off
made the switch disable itself, blame the cable, and offer no way back. A wired
device that exists can always be asked to come up; if there is really no cable
the attempt fails and says so, which is the honest failure. The word "off" is
used where the old text guessed "no cable", because nothing available here can
tell those apart.

Verified as a round trip against the real device, including that off stays off
through eight seconds rather than reconnecting a moment later, and that the
mechanism tested is the one the code uses -- the first test drove the connection
profile while the code drives the device, which are different things.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 12:13:49 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 4cbab01ae2 Show what has actually been installed
Automatic updates leave no other trace. The Flatpak that sat here as "1 update
available" installed itself at 00:14 this morning and nothing on the machine
would have said so.

Both sources are asked in their own machine-readable form and merged on time, so
the answer reads as one history rather than two lists to interleave by eye.

Two parsing traps worth recording next to the code. flatpak's --json prints
timestamps as "Aug 20 08:07:46" with no year in them, so the year is inferred
and a date that would land in the future is read as last year's. And dnf5's
start_time is epoch UTC while its own history table prints that same value as
though it were local -- checked against rpm, and the local rendering here is the
correct one.

The contract asserts entries are newest first, that none is dated in the future,
and that both sources parse; it was verified to fail by breaking the year
inference so every flatpak entry landed tomorrow.

Loaded on demand rather than with the page, because it reads both full
transaction logs.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 11:30:31 -04:00
Gabriel Brown de45f205ad Carry settings between machines by allow-list, not by stripping
panama-settings-backup already snapshots this machine so it can be put back
exactly as it was, arrangement and all. This is the other thing: an export meant
to travel, carrying the preferences that describe taste rather than hardware.

The export is an allow-list read from the preference schema rather than a
deny-list of things to remove. A key added later that happens to hold a token
cannot leak into a file somebody emails to themselves; being wrong in this
direction loses a setting, being wrong the other way publishes a secret. It
earned that immediately -- this machine's store holds an orphaned shadowOffset
from a setting that no longer exists anywhere in the source, and it was left
behind without anyone having to know about it.

Three settings stay: the display arrangement, which is keyed by output names
that mean nothing elsewhere; the last page opened, which is session noise; and
schemaVersion, which belongs to the store rather than to a person. Import is a
merge, so settings a file does not mention are left alone, and it is idempotent.

Two bugs made and caught here, in opposite directions. Validation missed 36
settings because "real" was spelled "float" and enums fell through entirely, so
an out-of-range or nonsense value would have been written straight into the
store. Correcting that then broke numeric enums -- vrrPolicy is an enum of 0..3
and the options were read with a regex that only matched quoted values, so those
settings had no known choices, were declared unverifiable and were refused:
valid settings dropped silently in transit.

The contract could not see the second one. It checked only that bad values are
refused, and when numeric enums were unreadable they never reached the bundle at
all, so every "did it arrive" assertion was satisfied by their absence. It now
requires the export to carry what it should as well as withhold what it should
not, and was verified to fail in both directions.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 11:02:42 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 52e2a83a78 Add an SSH Keys page, and refuse the one control that would lie
The page shows which keys exist, what the agent is holding, and the hosts this
machine has met, with a two-press forget for a host whose key has changed.

Nothing here reads private key material. Fingerprints and comments come from the
.pub file, and "does this key need a passphrase" is answered by asking
ssh-keygen to derive the public half with an empty one -- it succeeds for an
unencrypted key and fails for an encrypted one, and either way the only thing it
can emit is public. The contract checks that against the payload that actually
reaches the page rather than against the source, because what the code intends
and what it ships are different claims.

Unloading a key from the agent is refused, with its reason. On this desktop
`ssh-add -d` prints "Identity removed" and the key is still offered a second
later: gnome-keyring's agent lists every key it finds in ~/.ssh, so a removed
one comes straight back off disk. That was measured rather than assumed -- a
plain ssh-agent removes durably, this one does not -- and a button reporting
success while changing nothing is worse than no button. The page says so and
names the thing that does work: move the file out of ~/.ssh.

SSH_AUTH_SOCK is not set in a normal shell here, so a naive check reports "no
agent" while one is plainly running. The helper falls back to the keyring
socket, and an agent started by hand still wins. That gap is the same one that
made reaching these servers awkward in the first place.

Generating a key is deliberately absent. A passphrase cannot reach ssh-keygen
without going somewhere it should not -- -N puts it in argv, which every process
on the machine can read -- and driving the prompt over a pty did not work.
Offering to generate an unencrypted key instead would be a downgrade dressed as
a feature, so the page does not offer to generate at all.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 10:17:33 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 79b3d5cb85 Close the sweep's last blind spot, and stop shortcuts silently colliding
gapsIn and gapsOut were the only two compositor settings the write sweep had
never verified: Hyprland answers for them in CSS shorthand, "5 5 5 5", and the
sweep had no way to compare that. The preference behind each is a single int
that Hyprland expands to four sides, so a uniform reading compares exactly. A
non-uniform one is not something the preference can express, and is skipped
rather than collapsed to a number it never wrote. 63 of 63 verified live now,
none skipped.

Wallpaper thumbnails are cached. The report that five of them sat at "Loading…"
was a screenshot taken 1.1 seconds after the page opened -- decoding one of
these at tile size takes between 1.2 and 2.6 seconds and about ten start at
once, which the code already said. Measuring it did turn up something real
though: without a cache, scrolling back up pays that decode again for every
tile. The tradeoff is a wallpaper replaced in place showing a stale thumbnail
until restart, which is worth it for a directory of files that are added rather
than edited.

A chord already in use is now named rather than taken: "Super+Q is already
Terminal". Two actions on one chord means whichever Hyprland reads last wins,
which is not a thing to find out later by pressing it. Rebinding a shortcut to
the chord it already holds is correctly not a conflict.

Also: Open Appearance lands on the Windows tab now that the page has tabs,
Storage points at reclaimable container space, and a dock row shows its desktop
id only when two pinned applications share a name -- it is developer text, and
repeating it under fifteen recognisable names made the list harder to scan.

Written down because it cost the shell: QML has no default parameter values, and
`function openSettings(page: string, section: string = "")` fails the entire
configuration rather than the one function -- so the bar and dock went with it,
and 43 contracts failed at once pointing at the same line. qmllint --bare passes
that, which is why the usual check before touching the running shell did not
catch it. openSettingsSection exists as a separate function for that reason.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 09:56:02 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 1b845c0126 Rebuild Home around what this desktop already knows
Home led with a diagram of the attached monitor -- DP-2, 4500 x 3000, 1.13x
scale, XRGB2101010 -- which is Displays-page data, was the largest thing on the
screen, and has never been needed there. Under it sat a permanently open search
field for a weather location that is set about once a year, and then roughly
half a page of nothing.

It now opens with the two or three things somebody would open Home to do:
starting or ending a focus session, Do Not Disturb, and what is running. The Do
Not Disturb switch is disabled and says why while a mode is holding it, so it
cannot appear to be a control that is being ignored.

Findings sit above a reassurance line, the same shape the Firewall and
Containers pages use. Each finding names the page that can resolve it, because a
home page reporting a problem it cannot help with is only an alarm. On this
machine that is one finding today -- PostgreSQL and Redis reachable from the
network -- above "27 health checks pass, 522 GB free, snapshots ran at 02:00".
"Do next" appears only when there is something in it.

Weather stays, as the greeting's second line rather than a card with a search
box open, and its picker is collapsed behind the current location.

FocusModes was missing `import qs.config`, so DesktopPreferences was undefined
and the modes list came back undefined with it -- shipped two commits ago with
nothing noticing, because until Home referenced the service no isolated shell
had ever instantiated it. Focus modes would have quietly had no modes. Pulling
these services together on one page is what surfaced it.

LocationPicker gained a picked signal, the same way DisplayModePicker did, so a
container can put the search away without reaching into it.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 09:15:01 -04:00
Gabriel Brown f53ca16392 Make the focus exception list real, or it was a page telling a lie
The mode data model shipped with an allow list and nothing that read it. The
summary would say "2 apps may interrupt" while notification delivery never
consulted the list and no editor could set it. That is the dead row this work
has spent its time removing, introduced by the work itself.

The banner gate consults the mode in force now, and the list can be edited from
the applications that have actually sent a notification -- an exception for
something that never notifies is not a choice worth offering.

Exceptions belong to a mode. allowedApps is empty whenever no mode is active, so
a Do Not Disturb switched on by hand stays absolute and nothing can leak into
it. That scoping is asserted, not just written.

Verifying this took three attempts, and the second was a real defect in the
guard rather than in the code. The contract grep for FocusModes.allows matched
the comment that explains it, so the check passed with the enforcement deleted.
It matches the gate expression now. A guard a comment can satisfy is not a
guard, and this is the third time prose has satisfied one here.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 02:23:30 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 6dc606b872 Give focus modes conditions rather than alarms, and let Gaming hand over
A mode is on because something is true right now: a game is running, a window is
fullscreen on a given display, a workspace is focused, the clock is inside a
window. That is asked again rather than fired once, and it is the whole reason
schedules could be included here without the usual failure modes. A machine
asleep at 23:30, rebooted at 02:00, or opened at 08:00 into a window that has
already passed all reach the right answer by being asked again; an alarm gets
all three wrong.

The midnight-crossing rule is the part worth being careful about: a window
belongs to the day it STARTS on, so a Friday-only 23:30-07:00 covers Saturday
morning and must not cover Saturday night. That arithmetic was tested as pure
logic before anything was built on it, including every malformed input failing
closed -- silencing someone because a time string was wrong is the worst way
this could fail.

This does not take over the manual timed session. FocusSession already owns
that, with its capsule, shortcut, Quick Settings entry and contracts, so modes
defer entirely while one runs. Two writers of Do Not Disturb would each restore
whatever the other happened to leave behind.

Gaming hands over rather than being duplicated. The hook was silencing
notifications itself, which would have made exactly those two owners -- and
Gaming.active only polls while its settings page is open, so a mode could not
have seen a game reliably in any case. The hook reports the game over IPC now
and the mode decides what that means, the Gaming page points at it, and
gamingSilenceNotifications is retired from the schema, since a setting nothing
reads is the dead row this work keeps removing.

Sleep ships disabled. A desktop that starts silencing someone on first boot has
overstepped, whatever the default hour.

Three contracts moved with it. gaming-contract asserted the hook uses setDnd,
which was right before and wrong now; the shell-side assertions that setDnd and
dndState exist stay, because a toggle would flip an already-silent machine back
on. The new contract is proven to fail by breaking the midnight rule and by
letting modes run alongside a manual session.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 02:06:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 32fab59d24 Let a sound device be heard, and the Dock's icons be sized
Nine outputs named after their chipsets cannot be told apart by reading, so each
one gets a Test button that plays a short sample out of that device. Targeted by
node name rather than by making it the default first, because finding out which
is which should not move where everything else is playing.

That belongs in its own service rather than in AudioDevices. sound-page-contract
forbids Process, pactl and wpctl in the files that own device state, and it is
right to: shelling out there races the PipeWire service that owns those same
objects. Playback is a different thing -- pw-play opens its own stream and
mutates no device, so there is nothing to race -- but the rule's letter covered
it, and weakening a guard to fit a new case is how guards stop meaning anything.
SoundTest exists so AudioDevices stays native bindings only.

Worth recording next to the call: pw-play falls back to the default output for a
target it cannot find, rather than failing. A stale node name would play from
the wrong device and look exactly like a successful test, which is why the name
is taken straight from the live node.

The Dock's icon size was a constant in Theme. It goes through the preference
schema like everything else, so validation, search, the generated docs and the
write sweep all pick it up without being told about it separately -- and two
contracts duly failed until docs/settings.md and the per-page commands were
regenerated.

Dock position is deliberately not here. It is not a setting but a rework: the
dock is anchored bottom, and the reveal strip, tooltip placement, intellihide
and the qs-dock rule in hypr/rules.lua all assume that. Doing it properly means
changing compositor rules on a machine somebody uses daily, which is not
something to start as a side effect of adding a slider.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 00:03:21 -04:00
Gabriel Brown f6b970da21 Turn the rows that only reported things into controls
Autostart entries showed "Enabled" or "Disabled" as plain text. The row did
toggle on click the whole time, so this is an affordance rather than a missing
capability -- but a control that reads as static text is one nobody knows they
have. It is a switch now, with removal alongside it behind a confirmation:
disabling writes Hidden=true and can be undone, deleting the file cannot.

remove-autostart is confined to files the autostart directory owns. It resolves
the path and compares the parent, so a name like "../../.bashrc" cannot escape,
and it refuses symlinks rather than following them -- deleting through one would
remove whatever it points at, which is somewhere else and not ours. Each refusal
was tested against a fixture directory, including a symlink aimed at
/etc/hostname, which survived.

Sharing says who is signed in from another machine: user, origin and since when.
An empty list on this machine proves nothing, so the parser was checked against
sample `who` output -- it picks out remote sessions and leaves out local seats
and the :0 display, which would otherwise report the person at the keyboard as a
remote login.

Media sharing was "Available" and nothing else: rygel installed, rygel.service
disabled, no way to change that from here. It is a switch now, and it says what
it does before you touch it rather than afterwards -- turning it on publishes
media folders to every device on the network with no password in front of them.

Per-application camera and microphone permissions come from the portal's
permission store, which is where an application that asked through the portal
has its answer recorded. The page states the limit plainly instead of implying a
protection that does not exist: a program installed outside the portal opens the
device directly and nothing here stands in its way. Anything that is not an
explicit "yes" is treated as withheld, because guessing generously about a
camera is the wrong way to be wrong.

The first version of the write silently did nothing -- SetPermission takes an
array of strings and was being handed one string -- and the test did not notice,
because it discarded the helper's output and only checked that state was
unchanged afterwards, which was trivially true. The contract now requires the
value to move, and was proven to fail by putting that exact bug back.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 23:10:48 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 7e1c85b094 Group the long pages by what you are trying to do
Notifications repeated both lock-screen switch labels for every application, so
twenty apps meant sixty rows of the same two sentences and the page could not be
scanned at all. Each app is one row now, carrying what its switches add up to --
"On, lock screen shows the sender only", "On, hidden on the lock screen",
"Notifications off" -- with the switches behind it, one app open at a time. The
identifier only appears while an app is open, which is the only time it
disambiguates anything, and the content switch dims when the app cannot reach
the lock screen at all, because there it means nothing.

Shortcuts were already grouped; the problem was that "Windows" caught focus,
movement, splitting, resizing and window state alike and held 43 of the 93
binds. A section that long is a list, not a grouping. They are separated by
intent now -- Focus, Move & split, Size, Window state -- and the split was
checked against the binds this machine actually has rather than trusted from the
keywords. Order matters in two places worth naming: "Next window splits down" is
about splitting rather than focus, and "Focus session" is quiet mode bound to a
workspace rather than window focus, so both are settled before the general
checks.

Refresh rate gets its own row. That need was created by collapsing the
resolution list: the rates for a resolution were only ever reachable by opening
it, so changing nothing but the rate meant going through the mode you already
had. It appears only when the current resolution offers more than one.

Default-application rows carry a chevron, having previously opened a chooser
while looking completely inert.

The notification contract asserted the literal Notifs.appRule(app.id).enabled,
which moved when the rows collapsed. The rule is still read through a binding on
Notifs.appRule, so a rule changed elsewhere still reaches the row -- the
assertion now requires that, rather than requiring one particular spelling of
it.

The power profile rows were left alone. A three-way choice in three rows looks
wasteful until you notice each row explains what the profile does, and that page
has empty space to spare; a segmented control would trade information for space
that is not scarce.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 22:54:51 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 1aa1324083 Lead Appearance with light and dark, and stop pages listing whole datasets
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
2026-08-19 22:36:41 -04:00
Gabriel Brown ac5e6e2130 Add a Containers page, grouped by project and led by what is exposed
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
2026-08-19 20:49:04 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 536958430f Fix the polkit unit's ignored rate limit
systemd logged "Unknown key 'StartLimitIntervalSec'" on every start:
rate limiting belongs in [Unit], not [Service], so both keys were
ignored and the restart limit they were meant to impose did not exist.
An agent that failed repeatedly would have flapped rather than stopping.

Found while investigating reported prompt failures, which turned out not
to be a defect: the trace showed both authentications succeeding on the
first attempt. The failures came from testing -- prompts raised by
background pkexec runs and then cancelled seconds later, while someone
was trying to type into them.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 19:54:16 -04:00
Gabriel Brown fd99569666 Add a Firewall page, led by what is actually reachable
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
2026-08-19 19:46:16 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 4cbe3b882a Add a Gaming page, and let the desktop react to games
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
2026-08-19 18:55:10 -04:00
Gabriel Brown a15f019c17 Offer automatic package downloads, now that the machinery is installed
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
2026-08-19 18:24:30 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 116510caa8 Draw the authentication prompt ourselves
hyprpolkitagent's dialog is compiled into its binary -- no config, no
stylesheet, nothing to theme -- and it was the one window on this
desktop that looked like it belonged to something else.

The split between the two halves is the security design, not an
implementation detail. A small agent process owns the D-Bus side: it
registers with polkitd, receives the request, and hands the shell the
action, the message, who may answer, and a one-time cookie. It never
sees a password. The shell draws the prompt and, on submit, spawns the
setuid polkit-agent-helper-1 itself and writes the password to that
helper's stdin; the helper runs the PAM conversation and reports to
polkitd directly. The password exists in the shell and in the helper's
stdin and nowhere else -- never on a command line, never over D-Bus,
never through IPC arguments.

The prompt takes exclusive keyboard focus, because a password field that
lets keystrokes reach the window behind it is a keylogger with extra
steps. The request travels as a file created 0600 with O_EXCL inside a
0700 runtime directory: a cookie is not a password, but it is a
capability, and capabilities do not belong in a process listing either.

Three things cost real time. polkitd calls back on the same connection
that registered, so exporting the object on the session bus while
registering from the system bus failed every request as "Not authorized"
with no error anywhere. XDG_SESSION_ID is absent in a systemd user unit,
which runs under [email protected] and belongs to no login session, so the
session comes from logind's Display property instead. And PyGObject does
not accept the @ placeholder in variant format strings.

hyprpolkitagent stays installed as the fallback, only one agent is
started, and the comment beside the autostart says how to get the stock
prompt back. Verified end to end, including a real password accepted and
three cancellations refused.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 18:08:52 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 8f0fe23377 Add Software Update, across packages, applications and firmware
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
2026-08-19 17:25:11 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 6997dd535f Add high contrast, and make remote desktop configurable
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
2026-08-19 16:42:20 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 1f40f8e136 Add a snapshot manager, and start covering home
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
2026-08-19 16:11:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown e9d567aa72 Own printers, driverless only
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
2026-08-19 15:07:17 -04:00
Gabriel Brown a23b42841a Own user accounts and sharing
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
2026-08-19 13:05:13 -04:00
Gabriel Brown b743f44c5b Make changing a default application actually take effect
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
2026-08-19 11:59:53 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 8e93f08977 Show what the keyring holds, without showing what it holds
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
2026-08-19 11:14:32 -04:00