Panama/docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-19-settings-beyond-gnome.md

# Settings beyond GNOME

Written 2026-08-19, after the last GNOME panel worth owning was taken.

The goal has changed. Up to now the target was parity: make GNOME Settings
unnecessary. That is done except for Color, which is blocked by the platform
rather than by effort. What follows is the other direction — the things a
settings application should own on *this* machine, which neither macOS nor
Windows can offer because neither assumes you run your own infrastructure.

Everything below was checked against this machine before it was written. Where
something is not possible, it says so and why.

---

## What is already true

| | |
|---|---|
| `dnf5`, `dnf`, `flatpak` | present; **2 flatpak updates pending** at time of writing |
| `firewalld`, `nmcli` | present |
| `podman` | 22 images, 5.31 GB reclaimable |
| `gamemoded`, `mangohud` | present; Steam library is 1.2 TB |
| Nextcloud client | installed and running |
| `rustdesk` | installed |
| Self-hosted services | cloud, git, home, agentchat all answering over HTTPS |
| `wg`, `tailscale` | **absent** — the WireGuard tunnel lives on the router, not here |

That last row matters: a VPN page on this machine would have nothing to drive.
Skipped for that reason, not forgotten.

---

## Batch 1 — Keeping the machine current

The clearest "this OS is unfinished" gap. Both macOS and Windows put this front
and centre; here you update in a terminal.

### 1.1 Software Update

- Pending updates by source (dnf and flatpak, counted separately because they
  fail separately), download size, and which are security fixes.
- Whether a kernel update means a reboot, stated plainly rather than implied.
- When it last checked, and a switch for automatic updates (`dnf-automatic`).
- Update history, and what `dnf history undo` can and cannot reverse.

**Mechanism.** `dnf5` has machine-readable output; `flatpak remote-ls --updates`
is already scriptable. Applying updates needs root, so pkexec, prompting through
the agent that is already running.

**Deliberately excluded.** Automatic *unattended* installation of anything but
security updates. A machine that reboots itself into a new kernel while you are
mid-sentence is not a feature.

### 1.2 Snapshot before updating

The reason to do updates first. Snapper is wired up as of yesterday, so an
update can take a restore point before it touches anything — with the snapshot
named after the transaction, so the Snapshots page shows *"before 47 package
updates"* rather than a timestamp.

Neither macOS nor Windows does this cleanly. It is the single most distinctive
thing on this list and it is nearly free now.

**Done when** the machine can be brought fully current from Settings, and going
back is one click on a page that already exists.

**Landed 2026-08-19.** All three sources, counted and applied separately.
Firmware was added to the plan after the fact and belonged there: `fwupd` is
installed, reports cleanly as JSON, and answers instantly.

Two things the shape of the data forced. Checking costs about nine seconds, so
the page opens on a cached 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. And `dnf5` exits 100 when upgrades exist, which is
success, not failure.

Automatic updates apply to applications only, through a Panama-owned systemd
user timer running daily with a randomized delay. Packages still ask.
dnf-automatic is reported as absent rather than offered, because installing
software is not a settings action.

Health gained a check for it, which is where the interesting bug was: it first
returned status "degraded", and the doctor's vocabulary is ok, warning, error,
unconfigured. The check was counted as nothing at all while the summary still
reported healthy -- the same silent no-op this codebase keeps relearning, this
time caught by writing the contract. A contract now asserts every status a check
can return is one the doctor counts.

---

## Batch 2 — Your infrastructure — DROPPED 2026-08-19

Recorded rather than deleted, so it does not get proposed again.

The machine turned out to run essentially every popular self-hosted service:
Immich, Beszel, Uptime Kuma, Sentry, Gitea with runners, Jellyfin, Plex, RomM,
SearXNG, Open WebUI, ollama, ComfyUI, whisper, piper, the *arr stack, Vaultwarden
and more, across a home server and a VPS. On seeing it, the plan below was
revised once (read Beszel and Uptime Kuma rather than reimplement their polling)
and then dropped entirely, on Gabriel's judgement, which was right:

  * Almost all of it is infrastructure FOR other services rather than anything a
    desktop would consume. whisper on the server exists to feed Bazarr's
    subtitles, not to transcribe speech here.
  * The desktop has a better GPU than either server, so anything worth running
    for the desktop's sake should run on the desktop.
  * The one genuinely desktop-shaped idea -- dictation -- is already solved on
    this machine by Wispr Flow.

The lesson is worth keeping: the services existing is not a reason to integrate
them. A page earns its place by answering a question someone actually asks, and
"is my media server up" is a question Uptime Kuma already answers better,
somewhere the desktop is not.

**Possible survivors, both local rather than remote.** The Nextcloud desktop
client runs here and its sync state is a real desktop concern in the way iCloud
Drive is; RustDesk is installed here and pairs with the RDP controls already
built. Neither is "reach into my server", which is what was dropped.

---

## Batch 2, as originally written

The part no shipped operating system has, because no shipped operating system
assumes the user runs the servers.

### 2.1 Services

A page listing your self-hosted services with reachability, TLS certificate
expiry, and version where the service exposes one.

**Mechanism.** Endpoints stored as a preference (so the list is yours, not
hardcoded); an HTTP HEAD per endpoint and an `openssl s_client` for expiry.

**Deliberately a status view, not management.** Settings will not administer a
VPS. "Is my stuff up, and does anything expire soon" is the question worth
answering here; anything more belongs in the service's own admin surface.

**Watch for.** Certificate expiry is the row that earns this page. It is also
the one that must never report a false green — a check that fails should say
"could not check", never "fine".

### 2.2 Nextcloud

The iCloud Drive equivalent, and the reason this list exists rather than a
OneDrive page. Sync state, which folders, quota, conflicts, pause and resume.

**Mechanism.** The desktop client is running; its configuration is readable and
`nextcloudcmd` exists. **Risk to check first:** the client's status surface may
be too thin to drive a page honestly. If it is, this becomes a smaller card —
"syncing / paused / N conflicts" and a button to open the client — rather than
a pretend management panel.

### 2.3 RustDesk

The peer to the RDP controls already built. ID, whether unattended access is on,
and — the part that matters to you — whether it is pointed at your own relay or
the public one.

**Mechanism.** `rustdesk --get-id`, plus its config. Credentials follow the same
rule as everywhere else: never through Panama, never on a command line.

---

## Batch 3 — Machine control

### 3.1 Firewall

You expose services, so this is worth owning. Zones, what is open, and which
zone a connection is in.

**Mechanism.** `firewall-cmd`, which is fully scriptable, plus polkit for
changes.

**Deliberately excluded.** Rich rules and direct rules. They are a syntax, not a
setting, and a settings page that half-supports a syntax is a trap.

**This one is security-sensitive**: every change must state what it exposes,
and closing a port someone is currently connected over should say so first.

**Landed 2026-08-19**, and it found something. The page leads with the crossing
rather than the rules, because a port is reachable only when something is
LISTENING on a network address AND the firewall permits it -- and on this
machine that crossing is the whole story. The rules look unremarkable:
FedoraWorkstation, three services, a port range. 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 why
a rules-only panel can look tidy while a database sits open. 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 -- 25 entries became 14.

Rich rules are shown and never edited: a syntax is not a setting, but hiding
them would misrepresent the configuration.

**The contract needed a fixture, and the reason is worth keeping.** The rule
this page exists for cannot be tested against this machine: its zone permits
every port above 1024, so "listening" and "listening AND permitted" give
identical answers, and producing a blocked listener needs a port below 1024,
which needs root. With the crossing deleted the contract passed. It now runs
against a recorded firewall where two listeners are blocked, and catches it.

### 3.2 Containers

podman is here and Storage already found 5.31 GB of reclaimable images. Running
containers, images, disk, logs, start and stop.

**Deliberately excluded.** Building images and editing compose files. That is a
development tool, not a setting.

### 3.3 Gaming

You have `gamemoded`, `mangohud`, and a terabyte of Steam. Windows has Game
Mode; macOS added one.

Gamemode status and which process triggered it; the MangoHud overlay and preset;
how it pairs with the power profile Settings already controls; Proton versions;
where the library lives.

**Watch for.** This is the page most likely to become a dumping ground. It
should own the handful of things that are actually settings and link out for the
rest.

**Landed 2026-08-19.** Live-first, because unlike every other page here this one
has a genuinely live dimension: card temperature, power draw, whether Game Mode
actually engaged. It polls only while it is open.

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 with "balanced".
Verified with real gamemode activation, not just by calling the hook.

Two honest reports the page makes rather than hides. Game Mode's headline trick
is switching the CPU governor to performance, and this machine already runs
performance, so it says the change does nothing here. And Proton builds are
listed but never chosen: Steam picks the runtime per game, and a control here
would claim an authority the page does not have.

One bug worth recording. The hook first called a notifications IPC function that
did not exist, and the one that did exist was a TOGGLE -- which is the wrong
primitive entirely, because toggling at game start would unsilence notifications
that were already silenced. The shell gained an explicit setter and reader.

---

## Batch 4 — The developer surface

### 4.1 SSH and keys

Keys, agent state, known hosts, per-host configuration. Neither macOS nor
Windows does this well, and this machine has a pile of `ksshaskpass` entries in
the keyring already.

**Rules carried from the keyring work.** A private key is never read, never
displayed, and never leaves its file. The page manages *which* keys exist and
what they are for.

### 4.2 Settings that follow you

`SettingsBackup` already exists. Nextcloud as transport would make Panama
settings arrive on another machine.

**Watch for.** Machine-specific values — monitor layout, device names — must not
follow. A sync that carries a display arrangement to a laptop with one screen is
worse than no sync.

---

## Cross-cutting, and worth more than any single page

**Make snapshots ambient.** Now that they exist, anything risky can offer to
take one first: updates, restoring defaults, firewall changes. This is the
thread that makes a settings application feel *safe* rather than merely capable,
and it is cheap everywhere it applies.

**Make findings actionable.** Storage reports 86 GB in the trash and 5.31 GB of
reclaimable images, then leaves you to deal with it. The offer belongs next to
the finding — carefully, since these are the destructive ones.

---

## Principles this plan inherits

Every one of these was learned the hard way in the work before it.

- **No switch that lies.** If the mechanism cannot act — Color's missing
  devices, snapper's overridden rollback, a driver we cannot choose — the page
  says so instead of offering a control that changes nothing.
- **A write is not done until it is read back.** The failure that made "some
  things in the settings app don't work" true was a refresh that silently no-oped
  after a successful write.
- **Guards read the object, not a binding over it.** A derived property is stale
  inside the handler that changes it.
- **A test must be seen to fail.** "Something returned an error" is not evidence
  that your own code refused it; assert the reason.
- **Check what exists before writing a file.** Two components were overwritten in
  one session by not looking first.

---

## Order, and why

Batch 1 first: it is the biggest gap, it is self-contained, and the snapshot
pairing makes it distinctive rather than a copy of someone else's panel.

Batch 2 second: Services is read-only, which makes it low-risk and high-value,
and it is the page that makes this feel like *your* operating system.

Batch 3 and 4 in either order. Firewall is the most valuable of the remainder
and also the one that most deserves care.


---

## The authentication prompt

Not on the original list, and worth recording because of how it was built.

hyprpolkitagent's dialog is compiled into its binary -- no config, no
stylesheet, nothing to theme -- and it was the one window on the desktop that
looked like it belonged to something else. Panama now provides the agent.

**The split is the security design.** A Python 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 performs the PAM conversation and reports to polkitd directly. So the
password exists in the shell process and the helper's stdin, and nowhere else --
never on a command line, never over D-Bus, never through IPC arguments.

The request travels as a file created 0600 with O_EXCL in 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 and are worth writing down.**

polkitd calls `BeginAuthentication` back on the same connection that called
`RegisterAuthenticationAgent`. Exporting the object on the session bus while
registering from the system bus produced no error at all -- every request just
failed as "Not authorized" without ever prompting.

`XDG_SESSION_ID` is not in the systemd user environment, because a user unit
runs under `[email protected]`, which belongs to no login session. `GetSessionByPID`
fails for the same reason. The user object's `Display` property is the answer.

PyGObject does not accept the `@` placeholder in variant format strings; a tuple
has to be assembled from already-built variants.

**The fallback is deliberate.** hyprpolkitagent stays installed, and only one
agent may register per session, so the autostart starts exactly one and the
comment beside it says how to get the stock prompt back. A session with no
working agent can still authenticate from a terminal, which is the escape hatch
that made this safe to attempt at all.