v2.0.4

Three drawn pets for the desktop, an update flow that tells you when a release wants packages you do not have, and a release banner you can click.

Upgrading

From inside your Aphotic checkout:

aphotic sync

That pulls the repo, re-deploys the shell config, and refreshes every installed plugin. It restarts the shell, so the bar and panels blink out for a moment. Settings > About has the same thing behind its Sync update button.

aphotic sync installs no packages, because that needs sudo and a resolved profile. When a release adds one to a profile, it says so and you run:

./install.sh

which keeps the profile and layers you already chose.

To look without changing anything:

aphotic sync --check

Coming from 2.0.3 or earlier, aphotic update still works and still does what it did.

Desktop pets

The pet plugin ships three drawn pets. It is off until you ask for it:

aphotic plugin install pet

Pick one in Settings > Appearance > Desktop Pet. Drag it anywhere and it stays where you put it, wanders a short way around that spot, looks toward your cursor, and opens a menu of things to run when you click it. It sits under every window.

Each pet is repainted to your colours, so it changes with the theme and with a wallpaper you generate colours from.

Lumen

A sealed lamp adrift in the dark. Its shell stays dark and its light takes your colour, so it shifts the most between themes.

Cipher

A developer at a panel that floats beside him. The seams in his jacket and the lines on the panel carry your colour.

Kozumi

A small figure at a laptop she carries. The trim on her coat and the red through her hair take your colour; her face does not.

The three vector pets that came before them, Miko, Aphotid and Clip, are gone. A config naming one lands on its nearest replacement, so a desktop that had one keeps a pet.

More pets, and the material each was built from, live in T-Crypt/aphotic-pets.

Also in this release

The release banner now carries a way into About instead of being a line of text about a page you then have to find. Notification action buttons are drawn at last: the server always advertised support for them and nothing showed them, so an app offering "Reply" or "Open" gave you a popup with no way to take it up.

Safe mode and a way back when the shell will not start. A fifth bar style and a user-editable widget list. One icon resolver for every app icon, with user overrides. A rebuilt wallpaper picker. Aphotic Actions, one list of everything you can ask the shell to do, reachable from the notch's Commands tab and from aphotic action <id>. Quota bars, subagents and click-to-focus on the agent notch tile.

What's Changed

• Fix/omarchy pacman guard by @T-Crypt in #129
• perf: gate disk and network usage polling behind real visibility by @T-Crypt in #133
• greetd: opt-in Quickshell greeter preview scaffold by @T-Crypt in #130
• settings: center About pane, fix Plugins tab scroll glitches by @T-Crypt in #132
• bar: fix settings popout closing on filler-entry hover by @T-Crypt in #131
• wallpaper picker: blurred band backdrop, beveled cards, HUD rail by @T-Crypt in #134
• wallpaper picker: wrap the strip, rotate the rail, fix click targeting by @T-Crypt in #136
• plugins pane: settings shortcut on installed rows by @T-Crypt in #137
• icons: one resolver for every app icon, with user overrides by @T-Crypt in #138
• add a copyright notice by @T-Crypt in #139
• Fullscreen overlay surface kind, and a screensaver timeout to trigger it by @T-Crypt in #140
• Safe mode, and a way back when the shell will not start by @T-Crypt in #141
• bar: a user-editable widget list, shaped for a plugin surface kind by @T-Crypt in #142
• settings: manage bar widgets from the Bar pane by @T-Crypt in #143
• settings: draw the Aphotic mark on the bar widget logo row by @T-Crypt in #144
• bar: stop the workspace pill clipping its own glow square by @T-Crypt in #145
• overlay: a free anchor, for a surface the user drags by @T-Crypt in #146
• install: ship Qt's extra image decoders in both base profiles by @T-Crypt in #147
• wallpaper picker: preview the wallpaper the strip is centred on by @T-Crypt in #148
• agent-events: wire UserPromptSubmit and PreCompact/PostCompact by @T-Crypt in #149
• pet_action surface + session-to-window focus by @T-Crypt in #150
• Agent notch tile: quota bars, subagents, and a way into a waiting session by @T-Crypt in #151
• Aphotic Actions, and the notch's Commands tab by @T-Crypt in #152
• Settings preset rows can show a choice that is not ready yet by @T-Crypt in #153
• wallpaper picker: commit the wallpaper the strip is heading for by @T-Crypt in #154
• 2.0.4, and a Desktop Pets section in the README by @T-Crypt in #155
• About: a config-only sync that says when packages are missing by @T-Crypt in #156

Plugins: aphotic-plugins#29 replaces the vector pets with the three drawn ones. Pets: aphotic-pets#1 lays out the public catalogue.

Full Changelog: v2.0.3...v2.0.4