Seeding is deliberately conservative: a role whose preferred applications
are all missing is left alone rather than forced. That is right, and it
is also silent -- so a curated handler nobody installs presents as the
machine quietly going back to deciding defaults by installation order,
which is the problem seeding exists to fix. None of Loupe, Papers,
Decibels, Nautilus, mpv or sushi was declared anywhere.
Preview works, on org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer2 rather than the interface
its bus name suggests, but it opened tiled -- shoving the file manager
aside for something meant to be an overlay -- so it gets a float and
center rule sized to leave the file underneath visible.
xdg-utils and desktop-file-utils were undeclared too; seeding from
link-dotfiles started calling them, and the dependency contract said so.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Every role carried a single representative type, so setting "Images"
changed image/png and left image/jpeg wherever it landed. That is how
this desktop ended up opening PDFs in GIMP, PNGs in a pixel-art editor
and MP3s in a video transcoder: nobody chose any of it, applications
registered themselves for everything they could read, and the roles
governed one type each.
Roles now own families and write every type when set, the settings page
exposes the documents, text and archives roles it never offered, and a
new seed command curates a fresh machine during setup while always
keeping a choice the user has already made.
The shipped editor entry launches kitty explicitly. The stock
nvim.desktop sets Terminal=true, which defers to whatever the system
considers default rather than the terminal this desktop themes.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown