Notifications
mako shows notifications, and a few background jobs use them to tell you about updates, failures, and a snapshot boot.
Notifications come from mako, colored by the active theme. They appear at the top right over everything else, and the newest is shown first. A normal one disappears after five seconds. A critical one stays until you click or dismiss it.
On-screen indicator
The volume, mute, mic mute, brightness and do-not-disturb toggles show a small bar at the bottom of the screen for about a second. It is a mako notification that replaces itself, so it needs no extra daemon, takes the theme colors, and still appears while do-not-disturb is on.
Do not disturb
Super+D toggles do-not-disturb, and so does clicking the bell indicator in waybar. While it's on, notifications are hidden rather than discarded, and the indicator in the bar shows that it's active.
What sobarch notifies you about
Updates available
A daily check (a systemd user timer that first runs ten minutes after login, plus a random delay of up to fifteen) looks for two things without installing anything:
- Pending official package updates, or a newer
sobarch-skelorsobarch-scripts. The notification says so and, when clicked, opens Update System (details). - If you set up rescue media, a newer Arch ISO than the one on the rescue partition. Clicking opens Refresh Rescue ISO.
Each notification is shown once per distinct situation, so an unchanged backlog doesn't nag you every day. The system update one is re-armed weekly in case you missed it. If you're offline the check stays silent rather than claiming everything is current.
Package update failures
When the pacman hook syncs the vendored AUR/custom packages after a pacman -Syu and one of them fails to build or install, a critical "Package update failed" notification lists what failed. Details are in /var/log/sobarch/aur-sync.log. The first-boot steps that run in the background (the security baseline and the optional package install) report their progress and any failure the same way, since they'd otherwise fail where you can't see them.
Booted into a snapshot
If you picked a snapshot entry in the Limine boot menu, a persistent notification appears at login saying you're running snapshot N, and that changes made in this session are lost on the next normal boot. Clicking it offers to make that snapshot your permanent system, after a confirmation, using the same restore as sobarch snapshot-restore. A progress notification follows, then an offer to reboot. See Snapshots for the whole picture.
Progress and results
Menus that take a while show a progress notification that is replaced by the result when it finishes: scanning for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices, firmware updates, installing a package, refreshing the rescue ISO, and the system update itself. Failures use the critical style and include the error text.