Scratchpad terminal. The original config called hypr_workspace by absolute
path; splitting the config into common and host layers I rewrote those to
bare names, assuming PATH would resolve them. It does not: Hyprland's exec
runs with whatever PATH the session inherited at startup, which here is the
system default — no ~/.local/bin, no repo directories. That was survivable
while ~/.local/bin was a symlink into the repo, but the cutover made it a
real directory and removed the 29 duplicated scripts, so the binding broke.
Repo scripts are now named via $bin, defined per host in local-env.conf
because the home directory differs.
Same commit fixes toggleFloating.sh, which the shared config referenced as
/home/connor/.config/... — correct on two machines, wrong on the work
laptop. Now ~.
rbw. The old install.conf.yaml linked ~/.config/rbw on every host; I put it
in the mainframe and system76 host configs and forgot the work laptop, so
rbw there had no config at all. Moved to base, where it was always meant to
be.
Measured rather than assumed: the compositor and Sunshine together hold
220 MiB on the 3060 — sway ~112, Sunshine ~108. That card also runs the
local LLM, and with an 11.3 GB model resident on a 12 GB card the free
headroom goes from 992 MiB to 772. Losing a fifth of what is left matters
for KV cache growth, so leaving it running was the wrong default.
sway-headless and sunshine no longer start at boot. `stream on` brings them
up, `stream status` reports state and VRAM, and sunshine-idle-stop.timer
checks every five minutes whether any Moonlight client still holds a
connection to 47984/47989/48010 — stopping the stack after 15 idle minutes
so a forgotten session does not sit on memory the inference stack wants.
Note for future edits: `systemctl --user disable` on a unit dotbot has
symlinked into ~/.config/systemd/user deletes the symlink itself, because
systemd treats it as a linked unit. Re-run ./install after disabling one.
mainframe has no desktop and the only connected output hangs off the Intel
iGPU, while the RTX 3060 that encodes drives no monitor. Capturing the real
output would copy every frame between GPUs. So: a minimal sway session on
the headless wlroots backend, pinned to card0, with one 1920x1080 virtual
output for Sunshine to capture. Verified end to end — Sunshine finds
zwlr_screencopy_manager_v1 and creates h264_nvenc and hevc_nvenc.
(av1_nvenc fails because Ampere has no AV1 encoder; that is expected.)
Two things had to be fixed to get there. The installed sunshine-git was
built against boost 1.89 against a system now on 1.92 and could not load
five libraries — which is why the service had been enabled but never once
run. Replaced with sunshine-bin, which is current and prebuilt.
And Sunshine now gets a unit of ours rather than a drop-in: the source AUR
package ships sunshine.service while -bin ships
app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service, so a drop-in silently stops
applying the moment you switch between them.
apps.json replaces the stock file, whose "Low Res Desktop" entry shelled
out to xrandr and would have done nothing on Wayland.
The work laptop's first install left five files dirty, all of them wallust
targets. Tracking generated colour files means each machine rewrites the
others' palette on every theme change — exactly the churn a shared repo
should not have.
hypr, waybar and swaync now get their colours as real files written into
real directories, so nothing is linked and nothing is tracked. kitty and
qutebrowser land inside directories this repo links wholesale, so those two
are ignored by path instead. swaync switched from a directory link to two
file links to make room for its generated colors.css.
Regeneration is automatic: hypr_refresh runs every 15 seconds on both
laptops, so a fresh machine has colours within a quarter of a minute.
Both laptops run hypr_refresh and their unit files had diverged. The work
laptop's is the refined one — Type=oneshot, which is correct for a script
that exits, a 15s interval with AccuracySec, and a comment explaining the
wallpaper-daemon guard. system76 had Type=simple with Restart=on-failure,
which respawns a oneshot script continuously. Shared version wins.
Three more units existed only on the work laptop and were untracked:
backlight-probe, kanshi and mopidy.
Two passes, both aimed at a consistent experience rather than a faithful
snapshot of each machine's accidents.
Standardisation. Audited every host-layer config present on more than one
machine and asked whether the difference was intent or drift:
- mpv was byte-identical; swayimg differed only because system76 still
had the shipped default and the work laptop had the real config; bob
differed by one setting the work laptop was simply missing.
- user-dirs.dirs disagreed with BOTH machines and with zshenv, which has
said $HOME/downloads all along. Standardised on that.
- mimeapps.list is now the union of both machines' associations.
- swaync's config and style are shared; only wallust's generated
colors.css stays per host, alongside hypr's and waybar's.
All of the above moved to common/.
Dropped as pure state rather than config: gtk-2.0 (file-chooser geometry),
pavucontrol.ini (window size), zoom.conf (a per-install random_key) and
zoomus.conf (panel widths). gtk-3.0 stays per host — its bookmarks encode
the two different home directories.
App config. GIMP, inkscape, FreeCAD, cura, OrcaSlicer, LightBurn and OBS
all hold real settings, so a curated subset of each is now tracked:
settings, keybindings and user content, but not session state, tool
options, device lists or window geometry. kicad is skipped — both library
tables hold a single entry, i.e. untouched defaults.
Content lives once in common/ even when only one machine has the app; the
host configs decide who gets the link. That is the distinction that lets
53% of link sources be shared while the NAS still does not get GIMP.
Two exclusions on credential grounds: obs-studio/plugin_config holds a
websocket server_password, and gh is dropped entirely because `gh auth
login` writes a token into hosts.yml — now also blocked by name.
Five directories swept in held no files — matplotlib, three gtk dirs and
one mpv. Git cannot represent an empty directory, so they existed on
mainframe where they were created but vanished on clone, and system76's
install failed with "Nonexistent target".
install now checks every link source exists before running dotbot, so this
surfaces on the machine that introduced it rather than the next one to
pull.
Reactive capture missed wallust entirely, so this is a systematic pass over
~/.config on all four machines: every entry that is not already a symlink,
judged on whether it is hand-authored config or app-generated state.
Shared and identical everywhere -> common/: lazygit, ncmpcpp, neofetch,
matplotlib. Everything else differs per machine and goes in
hosts/<host>/config/: gtk-2.0/3.0/4.0, mimeapps.list, user-dirs.dirs,
mpv, swaync, swayimg, bob, pavucontrol.ini, zoom; plus beets, bottom,
glow and mpd on system76; fastfetch, gh, uv, traggo, tiling-assistant and
xdg-desktop-portal on the work laptop; inbox-tidy and llmfit on mainframe.
Deliberately excluded, all verified to hold live credentials: the work
laptop's Claude OAuth tokens (~/.config/anthropic/credentials), the NAS
restic repo password and hetzner.env, subsonic passwords in subtui, stmp
and termsonic, mopidy, supersonic, the Proton bridge env and the LiteLLM
virtual keys. The ignore list now names those shapes directly — a bare
`password` file would not have been caught before.
Also excluded as generated state or too large to be meaningful: GIMP,
kicad, BambuStudio, OrcaSlicer, calibre, LightBurn, obs-studio, feishin,
libreoffice, VirtualBox, FortiClient; and mainframe's dead X11-era
leftovers (i3, openbox, lxpanel, lxsession, pcmanfm).
Git reads both, and ~/.gitconfig wins. Linking only the XDG path left the
stale ~/.gitconfig in charge, so system76 kept signing commits as a
previous employer even after the cutover appeared to succeed — the symlink
was correct and had no effect.
Putting the whole ssh config in common/ was wrong twice over. It mapped
git.rcjohnstone.com to localhost:2222, which is only true on mainframe
where Gitea runs -- on system76 it broke git entirely. And it replaced a
77-line file holding 13 personal host aliases (storagebox, several
forwarded localhost ports, older work hosts) with a five-entry fleet list.
common/ssh/config now Includes ~/.ssh/config.local first, so host entries
win on the first-value-obtained rule, and carries only the fleet aliases.
Each host keeps its own list; system76's is restored verbatim.
The laptops are themed by wallust, whose config and five templates lived
only in ~/.config/wallust on each machine. A fresh install would have had
no colours at all: hyprland.conf sources colors.conf on its first line and
waybar's style.css imports colors.css on its first line, and nothing in
the repo generated either. Both generated files are now linked per host so
bootstrap works, and wallust writes back through the symlinks.
update_colors.sh was its predecessor and is now actively harmful: it
writes sway/config and wofi/style.css, neither of which exists on any
machine any more, and it regenerates waybar/style.css from a template that
was never carried across -- so running it would have overwritten the
shared Hyprland waybar style with sway-era output.
common/colors (255 theme files, 1.1 MB) was only ever its input.
dotbot does not carry a `defaults` block between config files, so the
host configs ran without force/relink and refused to replace paths that
already existed as real files — the opencode profiles, the Claude files,
the sunshine config and the old systemd units all failed to link. Each
host config now restates the block.
ddns.timer used OnCalendar=*-*-*/2, which systemd rejects: a day-of-month
step needs an explicit start value. The retired cron line was
`0 2 */2 * *`, so the correct spelling is *-*-1/2.
Replaces the previous repo, which had split into two histories that never
met (mainframe on a dead GitLab remote, the laptops on Gitea) with 146
dirty files across three machines and the NAS never enrolled at all.
Branch-per-machine is gone. One main, with host differences expressed as
small files under hosts/<hostname>/ rather than as branches, so there is
nothing to merge. The reconciled zsh layer reduces 15-33 line forks to
1-7 effective lines per host; distro differences (oh-my-zsh prefix,
syntax-highlighting path, fd vs fdfind) are probed in common/ instead.
Fresh history: the old one carried six plaintext credentials, 45 MB of
mail caches, browser caches and vendored binaries. 5,096 tracked files
and 144 MB become 462 files and 2.6 MB. The .gitignore is now an
allowlist, which is what keeps that true.
Root cause of the rot: ~/.local/bin was a symlink to scripts/ with GOPATH
inside it, so every go install wrote into version control (2.2 GB on the
work laptop). PATH now points at the repo instead of the reverse.
Also: Hyprland replaces sway and is sourced in two halves so $browser is
defined before use; singleton automations carry ConditionHost= alongside
host-layer-only placement; ddns moves from cron to a guarded timer;
package manifests and pkg-snapshot/pkg-restore replace the X11-era
install_scripts/; networkmanager-dmenu added to system76 (the binding
always existed, the package never did).
connor