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
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
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
Gabriel Brown