Fred's Tamlinux Plugin Suite

Motivation & Values: Hardware Longevity, Repairability & Community

Personal computing faces a quiet crisis of artificial obsolescence: software gets bloated, insecure, and unsupported long before the underlying silicon actually fails. Across personal workstations, Bosgame mini PCs, and older laptops running fragmented, end-of-life operating systems, maintenance becomes a frustrating burden. Worse, most legacy operating systems lack the introspective capabilities to diagnose whether an unusable system is suffering from genuine hardware failure or software degradation.

Tamlinux (a Wayland desktop on Hyprland and Quickshell, inspired by Arch Linux, Nix, and Omarchy) is aimed at getting the best possible performance from the computing resources you already own. Its philosophy of efficiency and repairability aligns directly with environmental sustainability goals: maximizing the lifespan of existing computing resources, keeping functional machines useful and secure, and reducing electronic waste. Because Tamlinux pairs an ultra-lightweight, standardized foundation with integrated AI agents, troubleshooting, root-cause diagnosis, and system repair become orders of magnitude faster.

Once refined across personal hardware, this suite of plugins is published openly in the spirit of giving back to the community and offering practical examples others can learn from. If time permits, the broader vision includes hosting community hacker gatherings at a local library or school where the public can bring in old computers that no longer work to see if we can get Tamlinux running on them—backed by a complete desktop shell suite designed to make those revived systems easy to troubleshoot, repair, and use.

The Manager CLI: tam-plugin

A dedicated CLI tool to inspect, install, update, and diff plugins across local workstations and official marketplace registries:

While commands like list and info are self-explanatory inspection tools, tam-plugin dev is built specifically to power the plugin development cycle. On declarative or package-managed desktops (such as Tamlinux with Home Manager), deployed plugins reside as read-only store symlinks in ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/. Re-running a package build or system switch on every minor QML tweak slows iteration down significantly. Running tam-plugin dev <id> on temporarily swaps the deployed plugin directory for a direct symlink to your local workstation config checkout (via FRED_CONFIG_REPO) and commands Quickshell to rescan plugins. This unlocks instant live hot-reloading: edits to QML or helper scripts reflect on your desktop the second you save. Once finished, tam-plugin dev <id> off cleanly tears down the development symlink and restores your managed system configuration.

# Check live inventory and marketplace status
tam-plugin list --all
 
# Inspect verified registry data
tam-plugin info fred.workspaces

# Fast development loop for local QML iteration
tam-plugin dev fred.clock on
# ... edit QML with live Quickshell hot-reload ...
tam-plugin dev fred.clock off

Transparent AI Collaboration

All software in this suite is developed collaboratively using a specialized multi-agent AI toolchain:

Every repository documents session prompts, model versions, and architectural rationale in AI_PROVENANCE.md and carries verified Git co-authorship trailers.