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
Shipping met reality tonight, and reality won three rounds before we
did. mpvpaper's -f forks it into the background, which a supervisor
reads as instant death — the respawn loop repainted the desktop black
once a second. The reaper's own kills fired onExited like crashes, so
the supervisor ate its young until deliberate deaths got marked. And
the video's path shared wallpaperPath with the still pipeline, whose
transactional persistence clobbered it — it now lives under its own
videoWallpaperPath key, read by the lock screen and the doctor too.
Restore is the service's own now, reactive and once per session: a
one-shot timer raced the async preference load and availability probe
at cold start and silently lost. A video-wallpaper IPC target drives
start/stop/pause from a terminal and from the contract sweep to come.
Verified live: one player per output, same PID across restarts, VAAPI
engaged, 0.2% CPU steady for 1440p30 h264, pause from the bar pill.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
Appearance now opens on Themes: light and dark side by side, each
remembering its own choice, over galleries of ten shipped themes —
Tokyo Moon and Day joined by Moon Rose, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and
Everforest in both modes. A theme is a complete palette: the catalog
lives in themes.json, Theme.qml reads every color token from the
active record, and one render pipeline carries it to kitty, tmux,
btop, GTK, Vicinae, Firefox's chrome, and the lock screen. The Theme
editor builds new ones from four wells — wheel, hex, or eyedropper —
with derived surfaces, a saturation slider, debounced fine-tune, and
effects that save with the theme. Custom edits finally keep GNOME's
accent, kitty's border, and hyprlock in sync.
Wallpapers can be video: mpvpaper per output, hardware-decoded, muted
and looped, supervised and respawned. Panama owns the pausing — games,
battery, and a bar pill for right now — because the compositor
rebuilds full-screen blur for every frame a video wallpaper draws.
The lock screen gets a still frame.
Titlebars stop lying. GNOME apps get close-only on your chosen side,
the maximize and double-click settings are gone, the Settings window
obeys the same rules, and its titlebar can be turned off entirely.
Typography becomes five labeled dropdowns instead of a wall of
samples.
Contracts updated and written throughout (165 now); per the redesign
workflow none were executed — the full sweep runs once at the end.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
Home is now Overview | My Home | Phone. Overview leads with quick-action
tiles (focus, Do Not Disturb, health, snapshots, storage), keeps the
findings card — updates fold in, the reclaim-space prompt is gone on
purpose — and adds glance cards, the next calendar event, and weather.
My Home groups every light by Home Assistant area: the helper gained an
`areas` command (one REST template render, no websocket), and the rooms
degrade to a flat list on setups without areas. The favorites editor and
connection card moved intact. Phone gains a vitals strip — battery and
cell signal read from KDE Connect's plugin D-Bus objects, where absence
is data, not an error — beside ring, clipboard, send-a-file, and the
BlueBubbles handoff.
The retired home-phone id resolves to my-home forever via a new alias
map in SettingsRoutes (with a hasOwnProperty guard so prototype names
cannot leak into settingsPage). Storage no longer claims 0 B free — the
old page read a field the disks helper never emitted.
Contracts updated alongside; per the new workflow, the full suite runs
once at the end of the redesign (see the test backlog note).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
The sidebar was a flat scan of thirty-one rows; now it reads like a
settings app. Multi-subject categories (Input, Network & Sharing,
Applications, Users & Accounts, Privacy & Security, System) carry an
Appearance-style tab strip above the page, drawn by the shell so the
leaf pages themselves are untouched. The taxonomy lives in one new
file, services/SettingsRoutes.qml; the sidebar, the strip, route
validation, search breadcrumbs, and both generators derive from it.
ShellState.settingsPage still holds leaf ids, so every deep link, IPC
call, and search result keeps working — and now lands on the exact
tab. Dictation moves out of Sound onto its own page under Input, with
a handoff back to Sound for the microphone. The strip scrolls when
System's nine tabs outgrow a tiled window. All 161 contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
A sweep for controls wired to targets the backend does not handle -- the shape
of the dictation bug -- found one more: "Start Orca" on the Accessibility page
called openApplication("orca") with no "orca" in the command map, so it set an
error and launched nothing. orca ships in hyprland-packages; it now runs.
That is the whole count. Every service-method call across 84 settings pages
resolves, every helper subcommand a service invokes is implemented, every
openGnomePanel handoff is allow-listed. Two dead buttons existed in the entire
settings app -- the dictation Download and this -- and both are fixed.
settings-buttons-contract pins the class: every openApplication id and
openGnomePanel panel a QML button passes must be present in SystemSettings'
dispatch maps, both of which return false silently on an unknown name.
Verified it catches the orca button when the fix is reverted.
And a dependency-contract exception the ffmpeg fix needed: ffmpeg is provided
by a swap (ffmpeg-free -> ffmpeg), never a list entry, because listing it is
the conflict that fix removed -- so panama-transcode's use of it is satisfied
without a package name to point at.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
Logging out of plain Hyprland left the desktop running. autostart.lua starts
about ten user units, none of them children of the compositor, and the shutdown
handler that was meant to stop them stopped hyprland-session.target -- a unit
Fedora does not ship. systemctl says 'Unit not found', the handler reports
nothing, and hyprpaper, hypridle, vicinae and the polkit agent keep running
after logout. Each of them Requires=graphical-session.target, so that target
stayed active with no session behind it.
The symptom was not a broken Hyprland. Both uwsm and gnome-session refuse to
start into a session that is already running, so 'Hyprland (uwsm-managed)' and
GNOME both bounced back to the login screen, and plain Hyprland -- which makes
no such check -- was the only one that worked. The session that looked healthy
was the one leaving the mess, and it was the one Panama tells people not to use.
Now stops graphical-session.target, which every one of those units is PartOf,
so a unit added to the start handler later cannot be forgotten here.
panama-crash-watch had the same leak and no PartOf at all: a journal follower
per login, and a 'once per program per session' dedup that had quietly become
once per boot.
Gabriel Brown