Gabriel Brown
41dd91eb75
Section G, the closeout. UPSTREAM-INSPIRATION gains the second and largest borrowing round: what was taken from omarchy, end-4, caelestia, ML4W and HyDE, what was rebuilt rather than transplanted, and -- the part that matters more -- what was declined and why. Wallpaper-derived colour is declined on identity, because dynamic colour is how rices end up looking like each other. Audio visualisers are declined because a continuously repainting equaliser is the GPU-pegging animation this project avoids. Patching application internals to theme them is declined because the maintenance is unbounded and lands on whoever is holding the desktop that day. DESKTOP-PARITY gains a Portable machines section, which it has never had, because until yesterday Panama was a desktop configuration in the code as well as on the machine. Nine rows, one of them honest about not having run on hardware with a lid. The remaining-gaps list gains the four things now known to be missing rather than the one. The README stops describing a desktop from before yesterday: migrations in the install flow, the welcome and cheatsheet and manual, and laptops working with every surface hiding itself where the hardware is absent. The plan records its own outcome per section, including the two places the work departed from it: D2's template renderer deferred once D1 removed the duplication it existed to fix, and E1 inverted after using it for an afternoon.
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Panama desktop parity
This is the living inventory for the GNOME-to-Hyprland transition. It records real behavior, not a one-for-one count of extensions: an enabled extension with no configured action is not treated as missing functionality.
Last live audit: 2026-08-17, Fedora 44, Hyprland 0.56.2, Quickshell 0.3.0.
Daily desktop surfaces
| Capability | Panama implementation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| App launcher and run dialog | Vicinae; Wofi emergency fallback | Live |
| App grid | Vicinae applications provider | Live |
| Hidden applications | GNOME App Hider list in Vicinae provider config | Live |
| Tiling and dynamic workspaces | Hyprland Lua config, Forge keymap preserved | Live |
| Overview | Continuum filmstrip, large workspace preview, cross-workspace search | Live |
| Minimize | SUPER+SHIFT+X sends to scratchpad; SUPER+X restores |
Live |
| Dock | Quickshell dock with GNOME favorites and intellihide | Live |
| Panel | Workspaces, CPU/RAM/GPU, clock, weather, quiet event capsule, media, clipboard, tray, status | Live |
| Clipboard history | Vicinae owns capture/storage; Quickshell provides the panel | Live |
| Notifications | Quickshell server, toasts, grouped history, DND, clear actions | Live |
| Date menu | Two-column Daybook with Agenda, Ongoing activity, Notifications, month calendar, weather, and media | Live |
| Ongoing activity | Focus, Caffeine, recording, screen sharing, camera, and microphone state with direct controls | Live |
| Calendar agenda | Existing GNOME, Google, iCloud, and Nextcloud sources through Evolution Data Server | Live |
| Control Center | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio input/output, Caffeine, Night Light, Focus, Home Assistant favorites, and KDE Connect phone continuity | Live |
| Focus sessions | Persistent workspace-bound timer, DND/caffeine coordination, Signal Glass controls | Live |
| Brightness | Appears only when a backlight device exists | Live, not applicable on this monitor |
| AppIndicator / tray | Native StatusNotifierItem host and themed menus | Live |
| Screenshot and recording | Quickshell picker, grim/slurp/satty/wf-recorder | Live |
| Screen text and code recognition | Local Tesseract/ZBar Read mode, selectable Prism result sheet | Live after package install |
| Lock, idle, and power | hyprlock, hypridle, login1, Quickshell power menu | Live |
| Wallpaper | hyprpaper | Live |
| Keyring and authorization | gnome-keyring and hyprpolkitagent | Live |
| Portals and screen sharing | xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland plus GTK portal | Live |
| Removable media | udiskie plus udisks notifications | Live |
| Autostart apps | Nextcloud, Bitwarden, and RustDesk system service/tray | Live |
| Printer administration | CUPS with the system-config-printer graphical interface |
Live |
| System settings | The Settings app for display policy, appearance, desktop, sound, focus, shortcuts, and services; labeled GNOME hardware/account handoffs | Live |
| System health and recovery | Settings → System Health, Check System Health in Vicinae, a degraded-only bar indicator, redacted reports, and bounded Panama-owned repairs |
Live |
Portable machines
Panama was a desktop configuration until 2026-08-22, in the code as well as on
the machine: there was no reference to a battery, a lid, or a power source
anywhere in it, and hypridle.conf said "This is a desktop" in its own header.
| Capability | Panama implementation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Battery level | services/Battery.qml reads sysfs the way Vitals reads procfs; bar indicator hides entirely without a battery |
Live |
| Power source | panama-hw ac; a machine with no mains supply reports as on wall power, so a desktop is never treated as running out |
Live |
| Charge threshold | Power page control, only where the firmware exposes a ceiling; written through panama-sudo |
Live |
| Idle timings per power source | hypridle holds one set at a time, so panama-idle rebuilds its config when the charger comes or goes |
Live |
| Lock on lid close | hypridle's before_sleep_cmd already locks, so a lid-close suspend is a locked suspend |
Live |
| Clamshell / docked | A logind handle-lid-switch inhibitor held while an external display is connected. No lid watcher, and a failure returns logind's default |
Live, untested on a lid |
| Display arrangement on reconnect | Displays.plannedRestore() reapplies a confirmed layout, refusing when the stored mode is not offered |
Live |
| Charger and low-battery notices | StatusEvents; the charger is ambient so DND quiets it, critical battery is not |
Live |
| Hardware predicates | panama-hw: laptop, battery, ac, lid-closed, external-monitor, clamshell, touchpad, nvidia |
Live |
The clamshell path is the one row that has not run on hardware with a lid. Everything testable about it is tested; the end-to-end behaviour of closing a real lid on a docked machine is not, and the helper's header says so rather than letting silence imply otherwise.
System health and recovery
Panama stays silent while the desktop is healthy. A compact bar indicator appears only for actionable warnings or errors and opens the same System Health page available from Settings and the Vicinae command Check System Health. The terminal summary is available with:
~/.config/quickshell/scripts/panama-doctor --summary
The doctor reports authored, redacted observations about Panama-owned services,
tools, links, and configured integrations. It does not read secrets, clipboard
or notification contents, calendar events, SSIDs, or device addresses. Repairs
are a small allow-list: Panama user services, Panama-owned links and launcher
commands, duplicate Panama Caffeine inhibitors, and a confirmed shell restart.
They never install packages, invoke sudo, delete user data, or rewrite
arbitrary configuration.
Generic Fedora configuration remains with the system tools that own it. The final System Health card hands network settings, users, sharing, color profiles, and digital wellbeing to their exact GNOME Settings panels rather than presenting inert Hyprland controls.
GNOME extension migration
| GNOME extension | Result |
|---|---|
| Forge | Replaced by Hyprland tiling and the original keymap |
| Dash to Dock | Replaced by the Quickshell dock |
| AppIndicator | Replaced by the Quickshell system tray |
| Clipboard Indicator | Replaced by the bar clipboard panel and Vicinae history |
| Emoji Copy | Replaced by Vicinae emoji search on SUPER+. |
| Vitals | Replaced by the CPU, memory, and GPU bar readouts |
| Weather O'Clock | Replaced by bar weather and the date-menu weather card |
| Caffeine | Replaced by a real logind inhibitor in quick settings |
| Blur My Shell / Openbar / User Theme | Replaced by the Prism shell and compositor blur |
| Bluetooth Quick Connect | Replaced by the full Bluetooth picker |
| Wi-Fi QR | Replaced by an on-demand QR-code sharing flow in Control Center's Wi-Fi panel; the code is generated only while shown and written to tmpfs, never persisted |
| GSConnect | Replaced by capability-aware KDE Connect phone continuity in Control Center; the paired iPhone exposes file, clipboard, and Ring actions when reachable |
| Home Assistant | Replaced by secure favorites in Control Center; explicit private environment values take precedence over the existing GNOME extension and Secret Service setup |
| Custom Hot Corners Extended | No action was configured, so there is no behavior to port |
| App Hider | Hidden app list is now applied in Vicinae |
| Allow Locked Remote Desktop | Mutter-specific patch; RustDesk is independent, but lock-screen access needs a real remote test |
System UI still worth adding
These are not blockers for normal use, but they are the remaining places where a polished general-purpose desktop can go beyond the current shell.
- A real external RustDesk test while hyprlock is active. Local process state cannot prove what a remote client sees or whether input is accepted.
- Closing a real lid on a docked laptop. The inhibitor, the predicates and the decision are all tested; the physical gesture is not.
- A keyboard-layout change notice. Hyprland reports the active keymap but not a change event Quickshell already consumes, so this needs either polling or new event plumbing, and a single-layout machine cannot test it.
- Sticky keys, slow keys and bounce keys. AccessX is an X11 server feature with no Wayland equivalent; GNOME, macOS and Windows all ship these.
- An on-screen keyboard, for a touch or convertible machine.
KDE Connect, the printer UI, Tesseract, and ZBar are installed and remain
tracked in setup/packages/hyprland-packages.
Global menu decision
A macOS-style global application menu is not being shipped. Quickshell can
render a DBusMenu that an application already exports, but it does not provide
an application-menu registrar or a reliable focused-window-to-menu association.
Hyprland has no cross-toolkit global-menu protocol, and the daily applications
audited here do not consistently export one: GTK 4/Nautilus and Electron apps
are the important failures.
That would produce a premium-looking empty strip for most windows and a working menu for a minority, which is worse than omitting it. Relevant references:
- https://quickshell.org/docs/v0.3.0/types/Quickshell/DBusMenu/
- https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/discussions/1358
A future focused-window menu could expose compositor actions such as float, move, fullscreen, and close. It should not be labeled as an application menu.