Document the installer rebuild, synguard enforcement, and kitty
The wiki stopped at 2026-07-28 and the whole synguard-to-now range was
undocumented. Installation.md still described a single ext4-and-GRUB
installer that no longer exists.
Installation — install modes now include ADVANCED (partition it yourself,
then name the partitions), plus the filesystem table, the bootloader table
and what each implies for the ESP, snapshots, swap and zram. Marked with
what is actually published: 0.2.4 has ERASE/ALONGSIDE only, everything else
is on main and needs a self-built ISO.
synguard — the enforcement model had no page anywhere. Adds the two paths
(post-hoc SIGKILL vs the in-kernel BPF-LSM gate) and why they are not
equivalent, the mode/flag split, the four things the gate cannot do, the
two cases where a DENY stands down, how to read the stats line, and how to
test a deny rule without killing your own session.
synsh — kitty is the default terminal; foot is kept as the CPU-rendered
rescue. Includes the dynamic_background_opacity trap, which cannot be fixed
after the fact. Terminal references updated across Commands, synui,
Window-Effects and Gaming.
Development Notes — five new entries, all from silent failures: systemd
dependency lists are additive-only so a drop-in cannot remove one;
socket-activated services resurrect a daemon you stopped, over the network;
an indented heredoc terminator swallows code while bash -n passes; a prompt
after a long step answers itself from typeahead; grep -q in a pipeline under
pipefail makes "must be absent" checks pass vacuously.
Add a Gaming page — game mode had no documentation anywhere
Game mode existed as one line in a keybind table, one row in the sudo -n
table, and a paragraph in synapd about VRAM. Nothing said what triggers it,
what it stops, how to stop it stopping things, or that there is a launcher
wrapper at all — and synui-game-run, the half that has to be in place BEFORE
a game starts, was named once in a command list and never explained.
The page covers both halves and, more usefully, why they are separate: game
mode acts on a game that is already running, while MangoHud and the governor
have to be wrapped around the launch, because you cannot inject an overlay
into a process that is already up.
Documented from the source rather than from memory: the detection rule (a
fullscreen XWayland client, which works because desktop apps are Wayland-
native and never match), what it stops and why synapd has to be stopped
outright (the wire protocol has no unload or sleep, only RELOAD and SHUTDOWN),
the idle hold-off and why a gamepad makes it necessary, the five default
exclusions and the fullscreen-video surprise they exist to prevent, and the
six synuirc keys with their real defaults.
Also the things people actually hit: MANGOHUD=1 only hooks Vulkan so an
OpenGL game needs the wrapper; the overlay ships hidden behind Shift_R+F12;
gamescope is on the ISO but mangohud and gamemode are optdepends; borderless
windowed is not fullscreen; a blank window at the right size is usually the
game's own resolution index.
Linked from Home, the sidebar, Keybindings, Commands and synui, which all
previously dead-ended on the subject.