APHOTIC

Documentation / Release Notes

Release Notes

These notes track real, shipped changes — sourced from the repo’s own version-bump commits and RELEASE_NOTES.md, not a projected roadmap. For the granular commit-by-commit history behind any entry, see the compare view on GitHub.

v2.0.7 — September 27, 2026

The Signal line skin brings one new look and one motion to every surface, and the Aphotic greeter becomes your login screen.

  • Signal line, a third skin for the Full bar style (Settings → Bar → Full style background): a flat bar with an accent baseline that flows into the notch, and glass panels, hairline borders and reworked layouts across the launcher, Command Center, Settings, popouts, notifications, OSD, lock screen, session menu, switcher and wallpaper picker. See Bar Styles
  • One shared open/close motion for shell surfaces, whatever the bar style
  • The Aphotic greeter (greetd) is now the default login screen, restyled to match; sddm stays installed as the way back (aphotic displaymanager switch sddm --confirm-tested), and install.sh --keep-sddm skips the switch. Omarchy keeps its own login
  • A versioned plugin runtime API: a plugin’s manifest [api] table grants it only the shell calls it names (aphotic plugin api)
  • One surface controller decides how shell surfaces coexist; the runtime context (aphotic context) and resource posture reach the whole desktop, and aphotic runtime shows them
  • The package search popout lists official packages before AUR results
  • The notch builds a plugin tile only while it’s shown, and the package installer popout only while it’s open
  • aphotic vpn expands ~ in the config path and says why a connect failed

v2.0.6 — September 24, 2026

Inference mode steps the desktop aside for local models, and the installer now finishes on plain Arch and recovers from broken upstream packages.

  • Inference mode: when a local model host (Ollama, llama-swap, LM Studio) loads a model, the shell turns off blur, shadows and animations and pauses what it can, then restores everything 20 seconds after the model unloads. Auto by default, off in Settings → AI
  • One Resource Engine claimant for every local inference backend, with llama-swap models tracked as GPU claims; the Resource Engine gained CPU and memory claims, and only a workload with a profile asks for arbitration
  • Flow gained workload passports, action receipts, a contention preview, and an opt-in shell-activity layer
  • install.sh installs the newest release tag by default, with --channel edge for the development branch
  • A required package that is broken upstream can be finished from the Arch Linux Archive snapshot of the last day the nightly install canary passed
  • Install failures explain themselves in one line and offer an opt-in, redacted report
  • install.sh lets pacman install the official packages when no AUR helper is present, installs wallust from its upstream release instead of the AUR, recovers from a stale AUR build cache, and ships every binary the shell uses in both profiles
  • NVIDIA detection finds every driver and skips nvidia-open on pre-Turing cards
  • Capsule is the bar style a fresh install starts on; a side-docked capsule fits its own icons
  • aphotic perf snapshots the desktop’s cost and checks it against a budget
  • Lower idle cost: CPU and memory read in process, local model hosts polled over HTTP in process, lock keys read from the keyboard LEDs, the local IP refreshed on network changes, and wallpapers decoded once at screen size

v2.0.5 — September 10, 2026

Flow, a new Command Center tab, is a live map of which resources your AI, gaming, security and dev work is claiming. See Resource Engine → Flow.

  • The wallpaper picker gained three layouts (coverflow, grid, dock), video wallpapers (shown as a still, with motion from the Live Wallpapers plugin), and a background surface kind for plugins
  • An Alt+Tab switcher that snapshots windows and commits on release
  • A workspace host for plugin tools: SUPER+SHIFT+W, bound only while a plugin provides the plane
  • GTK4 and libadwaita apps take the active theme’s colours
  • aphotic status, aphotic diff, aphotic reconcile and aphotic rollback report and converge plugin state against aphotic.toml; aphotic doctor reports checkout drift
  • aphotic plugin validate checks a plugin before it installs
  • Settings → About can run a config-only sync and says when packages are missing
  • The public documentation site

v2.0.4 — September 6, 2026

Desktop Pets now ship with three drawn, theme-recolored companions: Lumen, Cipher, and Kozumi. Install the Desktop Pet plugin to add one as an optional desktop overlay.

v2.0.3 — September 5, 2026

Omarchy is now a supported install target, verified on a fresh Omarchy ISO install (full out-of-box setup). EndeavourOS installed with Desktop Environment: None is also supported, as the same Arch/AUR base as a minimal install. See Compatibility for what’s different on Omarchy and why.

  • Fixed Omarchy’s own pacman-update guard blocking install.sh’s package sync on every fresh install
  • Fixed the Aphotic shell not actually starting on a fresh install whenever Hyprland was already running (Omarchy’s sddm autologin guarantees this every time, but the bug wasn’t Omarchy-specific)
  • Fixed a fresh install with no wallpaper picked yet showing solid black instead of the intended empty state
  • Omarchy’s own competing desktop shell is now replaced the same way Aphotic already replaces Waybar/Mako/Swaylock/Rofi elsewhere, and its idle screensaver keeps working through Aphotic’s own hypridle config
  • Default bar style is now minimal, docked top/horizontal by default

v2.0.2 — September 4, 2026

A fifth bar style, the Capsule, and a rebuilt notch that follows your bar to whichever edge it’s docked on.

v2.0.1 — September 3, 2026

install.sh now detects AMD GPUs, installs their Mesa and RADV Vulkan drivers, and picks the Ollama GPU runner that matches your card (ollama-rocm on AMD, ollama-cuda on NVIDIA), so local models stop running on the CPU.

  • A guided install flow for first-time users in place of twelve scattered prompts
  • A plugin can contribute a chat provider, and the install refuses a plugin this shell has no host for
  • Optional package failures are skipped and reported instead of aborting the install
  • Themes can be downloaded from a remote index, and each theme’s palette is clamped to its own margins
  • The notch, and Settings → Language with live keyboard-layout apply

v2.0.0 — August 31, 2026

Modular plugin architecture — AI agent capabilities are now independently installable and removable plugins instead of automatic base-shell behavior. See Plugin System for the full design.

  • Agent Graph and each harness’s live session tracking (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) split into separate opt-in plugins (agent-graph, claude-hooks, codex-hooks, opencode-hooks), distributed from the new aphotic-plugins repo
  • New harness-hook plugin capability, for a plugin that wires itself into a different program’s own config (Claude Code’s settings.json, Codex’s hooks.json, OpenCode’s plugin auto-discovery directory)
  • The bar’s agent icon now reflects installed-and-enabled plugins, not mere harness-process presence
  • Upgrading from 1.x: run aphotic plugin install <name> for each harness you use, plus agent-graph, to restore the live-tracking behavior that used to be automatic — see Agentic Workflows’s “Turning it on” section

See the GitHub Release for the full changelog.

v1.2.0 — August 29, 2026

Agent Graph — a live, zoomable node graph of a Claude Code session’s tool calls as they happen, with a replay transport for finished runs. Fully opt-in behind the ai layer. See Agentic Workflows for how it works and exactly what’s collected.

  • Live Agent Graph tab in the Command Center, plus per-run replay archives
  • aphotic whatsnew — Hyprland-native release-note banners (hyprctl notify) shown once on first login after an update
  • Install wizard now leads with a layer preset menu (Everything / Daily driver / Cherry-pick) instead of prompting every layer cold
  • Dock bar: fixed pointer input dying outside a narrow band in the middle of the pill, window-overlay/right-edge icon clipping, scroll-to-volume, real per-app status icons
  • Media bar icon: right-click opens the player; live per-session agent status wired into the bar popout
  • CLI: fixed a duplicate-daemon spawn, an SDDM permission edge case, and aphotic ai profile handling
  • Installer: stopped forcing nvidia-open-dkms on top of an already-installed driver
  • Added a beta-status disclaimer and fixed several stale README references

See the GitHub Release for embedded preview clips.

v1.1.0 — August 27, 2026

Swappable bar styles and an opt-in local Aphotic Assistant, plus a wide batch of smaller shell features.

  • Bar style system — four swappable styles (Full/Dock/Taskbar/Minimal), each with its own live preview and per-style sub-options in Settings → Bar, plus a CLI/keybind to cycle them
  • Exploit layer split into a sublayer taxonomy (recon, web, network, passwords, wordlists, reversing, forensics, reporting), gated behind an explicit authorized-use disclaimer — see Security
  • Notification Center — persistent history in a right-docked popout (SUPER+N)
  • AUR package search-and-install popout (SUPER+Y, Arch-only)
  • Intelligence — a right-docked quick-chat popout separate from the Command Center’s AI Chat tab, with persisted per-session history
  • llmfit hardware-aware model recommendations added to the ai layer; Aphotic Assistant — an opt-in local chatbot for NVIDIA installs (install.sh --with-assistant)
  • Claude Code hook wired into install.sh — the first version of the live agent-session tracking that Agent Graph builds on in 1.2.0
  • Six “low-lift” shell features in one pass: weather widget, screen color picker/eyedropper, Do Not Disturb toggle, most-used-apps launcher sort, wallpaper auto-cycle slideshow, notification quick-toggles card
  • SDDM login screen greeting customization

v1.0.0 — August 22, 2026

Renamed from Noctis-Hypr to Aphotic-Hypr, alongside the Command Center’s initial build-out.

  • Command Center — Dashboard, Workspaces, and AI Chat tabs behind one overlay, plus the first pass of the full-screen Settings control center
  • Exploit layer introduced (BlackArch-backed offensive-security tooling), later split into sublayers in 1.1.0
  • Bar resource meter (CPU/memory/disk) status icon + popout
  • systemd --user restart-supervision for the Quickshell daemon
  • Cross-theme wallpaper picker in the Appearance pane
  • GTK theming fixes (adw-gtk3-dark instead of bundled Adwaita-dark; Thunar picking up wallust colors correctly)
  • All eight theme wallpapers replaced with original, license-clean art

v0.9.0 and earlier — Pre-1.0 development

Version tracking (a VERSION file plus CI) was only added at the 0.9.0 bump; everything before that was iterative development under the Noctis-Hypr name — retiring Waybar/Mako/Rofi in favor of the hand-vendored Quickshell shell (launcher, notifications, OSD, lock screen, session/power menu, dashboard), building out the aphotic/noctis CLI, and the original theme/wallust integration. There’s no clean version-by-version breakdown for this period; see the full commit history if you want the real detail.

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