signals from the wired.

The site has a new page, and it's one of our strongest positions. chromium tells the full story of how a browser engine became part of the operating system — nine chapters, from the shipped work to the horizon.

What's on the page: the webapp runtime (72 launchers, the navi-webapp CLI, local-first catalog engineering), managed policy (nightshadeNeon, uBlock Origin Lite, Proton Pass — small, explicit, and honest about ownership), the browser lineup (Chromium default, Helium dogfooding, Edge as an evaluated option), our public Edge-on-Linux issue tracker and the evidence-rich submissions behind it, blackice's staged path from dogfood to owned privacy infrastructure, why Helium leads as accela's likely base, and the roadmap with its guardrails — what ships, what's dogfooding, what's planned.

The throughline: navi can be opinionated about the integration layer without pretending there's one correct browser for everyone. Choice comes from making the integration legible, keeping alternatives available, and separating what ships from what is merely planned.

— xvoidsx

One room for every agent — now with opinions and a scoreboard. The agent center (navi-agents-config, one click on the panel's robot face) is now six tabs: status, models, harnesses, autonomy, evals, and providers. It's becoming the one place the whole agent layer of the machine is run from, instead of a pile of scattered config files.

Autonomy: how much your agents ask. A real dial, not a placebo — it writes OpenCode permission profiles to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json (every other key in the file is preserved): ask me makes every tool check with you first, balanced lets reads and search run free while edits, commands, and subagents ask — with rm and sudo denied outright — and yolo gets out of the way. We scoped it honestly: herdr exposes no approval lever and no harness reads navi's files, so a cross-harness autonomy switch would have been theater. Other harnesses keep their own settings, and the UI says so.

Evals: race your models. Pick any of your pulled Ollama models and run them against an eight-prompt built-in set — code, reasoning, instruction following, writing, math, explanation, JSON, summarization. A local judge model scores every answer 1–5, and you get per-prompt scores, averages, and a winner. Token-capped, cancellable mid-run, all on your machine.

Super+Ctrl+H opens herdr anywhere. The agent workspace manager, one chord away, in a floating terminal. And jumping to an agent from the status tab now attaches by pane id — the floating window morphs straight into the agent's terminal, quick and into the conversation.

On the eiri channel now: run navi-update on eiri and the center is six tabs. One honest note: if your sway config is customized, the updater preserves it by design, so add the new keybinding yourself or run navi-wired-adopt — and reload sway after any update that touches keybindings.

— xvoidsx

The eiri work lands in main. Everything the eiri branch has been building — the design-language overhaul, the new theme, the refreshed panel stack — has merged into main as 1.6 “mika”. Both ISOs are green: the stable 1.6 build and the eiri rolling build. The tag v1.6-mika is cut and the GitHub release is published — /releases/latest now serves 1.6.

One design language, everywhere. This is the big one. navi now ships xvoidsx’s own nightshadeNeon GTK theme (GTK3 + GTK4) with Moka icons, wired through the installer into GTK2/3/4 settings, dconf, and Flatpak overrides — so file managers, dialogs, and settings panels all speak the same neon. The rofi launcher, dunst notifications, conky panel, and waybar were rebuilt in the same pass: obsidian-glass bar, the green/pink selection treatment, the glitch accents. Terminal, bar, launcher, notifications, toolkit — one stack, one voice. We own the whole stack now.

What stable gets, what stays on eiri. The theme, icons, and the rofi/dunst/conky/waybar refresh ride the stable channel in 1.6. The new waybar mods — navi-networking, navi-audio, navi-calendar — and the Hey Lain! voice assistant stay on the eiri channel for now, where they’re still being tuned. eiri remains rolling and branch-scoped: it never gets tagged, and its ISOs never touch the releases page. Switch channels any time with navi-update --channel eiri / --channel stable — your customized configs survive the trip either way.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.6-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and you’re on 1.6. Want the new panel defaults on a customized config? navi-wired-adopt lays the stock wired configs over yours, backup first.

Download: navi-1.6-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

Our first field-reported bug, fixed. A friend installing navi in a VM watched the installer die at the network screen — despite working internet. The culprit: the installer's screen-clear calls ran unguarded under set -e, and the first one fires right before network setup. On VM consoles and minimal shells where clear fails, the whole installer exited instantly with no error message. All three sites are now failure-proof, so installs complete and real errors actually print.

The connectivity check retries. Starting NetworkManager can flap the link for a few seconds; the probe now tries three times before concluding a machine is offline, so a momentarily flapping connection doesn't abort an install on a machine that's actually online.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.5.1-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and you're on 1.5.1. No desktop or package changes: 1.5.1 is 1.5 plus the installer fix.

Download: navi-1.5.1-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

navi ships a default terminal IDE. NaviVim — the full Neovim distribution — is now baked into the distro from the get-go: neovim 0.12.5 from the upstream tarball (Debian stable's 0.10 is too old for the plugin stack, and pinning to testing would drag testing libc onto a stable base), installed system-wide with editor/vi alternatives, EDITOR/VISUAL set for every shell, and /etc/skel seeding so every new user lands in it. There's a rofi entry too — just type NaviVim.

Pinned, reproducible, offline-safe. The ISO stages the NaviVim tree and the neovim tarball at build time, so fresh installs never reach for the network to get an editor. Both pins live next to the code that consumes them — a version bump is one edit plus a restage.

Your config is sacred. The installer seeds ~/.config/nvim only when you don't already have one — existing setups are never touched. And navi-update stays cheap: when the pinned neovim is already installed, it skips the binary entirely and just refreshes the config.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.5-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and you're on 1.5. The first run downloads the plugin set headlessly, so give it a few minutes.

Download: navi-1.5-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

The bell floats now. Really. 1.4.5's mod-open.sh floated the notification viewer on paper, but on real hardware the window still tiled — the launcher trusted environment variables and matched the window by title, and both can lie. Now it probes the compositor with a real round-trip instead of guessing, and the backstop floats the window by PID, which no TUI can rename out from under it. It also leaves a one-line log at ~/.local/share/navi/mod-open.log per launch, so any future misbehavior leaves footprints.

navi-update now reloads waybar. The updater deployed new waybar configs but never told the running bar — so new on-clicks and modules only took effect after a re-login, and fresh launchers sat idle on live systems. After deploying configs, the installer now sends waybar its documented config-reload signal. One more quiet paper cut gone.

Waybar CSS fix rides along. The @keyframes comma selector that broke GTK's CSS parser in 1.4.5's stylesheet is fixed in this tag — updaters get the pink pulse with no manual edit.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.4.6-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and the bar reloads itself; the bell should float immediately.

Download: navi-1.4.6-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

Floating, for real this time. 1.4.4's notification launcher floated the viewer with a single sleep-then-float — a race slower machines kept losing, so the window tiled. The new mod-open.sh launcher installs a runtime for_window rule before the window maps (no race possible), then polls and floats directly as a backstop. Both the notification bell and the update indicator open through it — standing rule going forward: navi mods always float.

navi-wired-adopt — take the new desktop wholesale. navi-update preserves your customized configs by design, which means new stock defaults wait for you to say otherwise. navi-wired-adopt is the otherwise: it lays the current stock wired configs over yours, with a backup first and a loud warning before anything changes — because adopt means adopt. --dry-run to preview, and it offers to reload the window manager and bar when it's done.

The panel got its neon. The update indicator and bell always reported state, but the stylesheet never styled it — everything looked the same lit or dim. Now the quiet states sit dim, the bell glows cyan when notifications wait, and the update indicator pulses neon pink while updates are pending.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.4.5-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and you're on 1.4.5. Then navi-wired-adopt if you want the new panel behavior on a customized config.

Download: navi-1.4.5-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

sudo, finished properly. 1.4.3 put you in the sudo group — but group membership only takes effect on your next login, so installers expecting sudo (ani-cli, the nightly browsers, our own scripts/installers) still failed in the same session. 1.4.4 writes a dedicated rule for your user in /etc/sudoers.d/10-navi-user, validated with visudo -c: it takes effect on the very next sudo call, no logout required. Password-required, same feel as doas permit persist. doas stays the navi-native way up; sudo is the compatibility layer.

The notification viewer got its glow-up. navi-notifs now gives every notification room to breathe — pink index, dimmed app name, the summary bold on its own line, the body word-wrapped beneath, actions in neon green, separators between entries. And it finally floats: clicking the panel bell opens through a launcher that tells the compositor to float and center the window, so it works on customized sway configs too (the stock-config rule stays as a backstop).

Panel feng shui. The update indicator moved left of the volume control — no more rubbing shoulders with the notification bell. It already checks navi-update --check automatically every 15 minutes and lights up when updates are waiting.

Manual, aligned. The built-in manual (Super+Shift+H) and the online copy now document doas vs sudo, the notification viewer, and the update indicator — both copies updated together.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.4.4-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and you're on 1.4.4.

Download: navi-1.4.4-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

Two Cloudbook-found bugs, fixed. The notification viewer (navi-notifs) crashed on real data — it parsed dunstctl history as plain strings, but real dunst output is busctl JSON where every D-Bus variant arrives wrapped as {"type": "<sig>", "data": <value>}. Every field read now goes through an unwrap helper, tested against the real shape. And sudo ships on every install and update: added to the base package set, the user lands in the sudo group, and a temporary passwordless rule during provisioning is locked back down at the end of the install — mirroring the doas flow. doas remains the navi-native way up; sudo is there for compatibility.

Also fixed: the Dropbox icon rendered black (invisible) on the dark theme — it was the only icon in the set missing its white fill.

One manual step for existing installs: if you customized your sway config, the updater correctly kept it — so add for_window [title="navi-notifs"] floating enable to ~/.config/sway/config and reload sway ($mod+Shift+c) to float the notification viewer. New installs get it automatically.

Updating: navi-update --check sees v1.4.3-mika as the newest tag — run navi-update and you're on 1.4.3.

Download: navi-1.4.3-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

the notification viewer works now. 1.4 shipped navi-notifs with a Python syntax error that kept it from listing anything — fixed, along with two latent crashes hiding behind the first one. The viewer also got its nightshadeNeon colors (neon pink header, neon green actions) and now floats instead of tiling.

Also in this patch: the installer banner and success screen say 1.4.2 (they were still showing 1.3), and the ISO release checklist now covers every human-facing version string so it can't go stale again.

Download: navi-1.4.2-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

navi learns to update itself. 1.4 brings navi-update — pull the release channel and redeploy the desktop layer while keeping every config you've customized — plus navi-wired-restore, which shows you exactly how your setup drifted from stock and restores what you choose, with backups of everything it touches.

Also new: two waybar mods (an update indicator and a notification bell with a viewer), Dropbox as a default webapp, and maintenance fixes — imv, filezilla and gufw in the installer, /usr/sbin on the PATH, and passwordless flatpak management for the local user.

On release trust: we're deliberately not committing to a signing scheme for 1.x — the ceremony has to fit how we actually work, and that decision deserves real exploration. It's one of the main conversations for the eiri era. Until then, navi-update pulls the channel and says so loudly.

Download: navi-1.4-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

A fast follow on the stable release. navi 1.3 “mika” folds in the updated manual (audited keybindings, the current agent lineup), and adds glow to the installer live environment for reading markdown docs. Same stable foundation, a little sharper.

Download: navi-1.3-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

— xvoidsx

Our first stable release is here. navi 1.2 “mika” is a complete, opinionated Linux system: the wired tiling desktop, open agent tools baked in from the first boot, local webapps, and native software moving together on a dependable Debian base.

What's inside:

• Wayland-only desktop — sway is the session, full stop. X11 apps keep working through XWayland.
• Agent-native — ollama, opencode, omp, goose, and herdr ship out of the box. Press Alt+A anywhere for navi-Q.
• nightshadeNeon — our design language across the whole desktop: deep blacks, neon pink, phosphor green.
• Webapp layer — the naviApps store, navi radio, neighborli, and glyyph, all launchable from the desktop.
• Permacomputing — validated on a 2015 Acer Aspire Cloudbook. If it runs there, it runs anywhere. Legacy BIOS and UEFI both supported.

Download: navi-1.3-mika.iso + SHA256SUMS ↗

New to navi? Press Super+Shift+H after installing for the built-in manual, or read it here on the web.

What's next: small maintenance on the 1.3 line, then navi 2 “eiri” — the coherence release.

— xvoidsx