0.2.5 is out — the installer pages describe a shipped release now
Both pages carried a "this is on main, build the ISO yourself" marker written
while 0.2.4 was the newest published one. 0.2.5 is now Latest and contains all
of it, so the markers say what an installed system HAS rather than what is
coming:
- Installation: the filesystem and bootloader choices, snapshots, ADVANCED and
swap/zram are in 0.2.5; 0.2.4 and earlier had ERASE and ALONGSIDE only, ext4
and GRUB, and no swap of any kind.
- synsh: kitty is new in 0.2.5, and an upgraded machine still keeps foot —
nothing rewrites a user's synuirc.
The 0.2.1 and 0.2.3 references elsewhere are historical and still true.
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.
wiki: initial operator's manual
Ten pages: installation, keybindings, architecture, per-component pages
(synapd, synui, synguard+kmod, synsh), Secure Boot, building/packaging,
cutting an ISO release, and a troubleshooting catalogue.
The wiki deliberately carries what the README cannot: the failure modes.
Nearly every hard bug in this project has been SILENT — a build that exits 0
on stale code, a dkms module that reports installed while being unloadable, a
security rule that reports clean because it was reading garbage. Those are
written down here with the generalisable lesson attached.