Picker browsing: partial improvement, acceptance still open

Physical board, 2026-09-27 UTC. This compares one injected browsing run before and after source 2fb371a5’s bounded thumbnail working set and motion pre-render gate. The new run exposed a saved-theme lookup failure: backgrounds stayed at “Loading backgrounds.” This is not a completed picker performance result.

Sampled native browsing video · Old measurements · New measurements · Catalog check

Observations

All sixteen drags in each run delivered down, twenty moves and up. The active generation remained unchanged. Both runs used the same kernel Image and compositor executable; the exact systems and Rust executables are in the JSON records. The catalog contained 23 themes; the active saved report contained five backgrounds.

The motion gate is exercised and no speculative completion occurs while touch is held in the new run. Warm swipes are still slow. Neither run reproduces continuous idle redraws. The missing background row confounds the opening and memory comparisons: fewer commits or lower RSS cannot be called a performance win when expected content is missing. The old process was already running before this test; neither first opening is asserted to be a matched cold start.

After the new run, k230-theme list reported an active generation but a null active catalog ID. Source inspection found that matching only the saved source path loses a bundled theme when a rebuilt Nix package moves that source into a different store directory. No activation or credential change was performed. The existing proposal tracks that repair separately.

Reproduction and provenance

The root coordinator reserved the board and serial port. A distinct evemu device copied the physical touchscreen descriptor, named K230 injected touchscreen. The collector refuses any event node whose sysfs path is not beneath /sys/devices/virtual/input with that exact name. It never writes injected events into the physical touchscreen node.

With Settings visibly open and the virtual device at /dev/input/event1:

/nix/store/v189xydz6qkcd4cbkixcmv91w8hbc560-python3-riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu-3.14.7/bin/python3 /run/k230-picker-baseline.py \
  --device /dev/input/event1 --expect-rust-exe EXACT_EXE_FROM_PROC \
  --state-root /home/shell/.local/state/omarchy/current \
  --label old --output /run/picker-old.private.json --settings-ready

Repeat with the new exact executable, label and output. capture.py is the collector; reduce.py retains numeric observations and approved executable identities, hashes the active-generation identity, and omits raw journal text and private state paths. Initial launch with python3 on PATH failed before input because the image does not expose it there; the recorded runs used the exact pinned interpreter above.

The sequence is Settings idle 2 seconds; open 10 seconds; six theme drags and four background drags with 1.2 seconds settling each; idle 15 seconds; back/reopen 5 seconds; six warm theme drags; idle 15 seconds. Process CPU, RSS and service cgroup CPU are sampled about every 0.5 seconds. Journal collection follows the sequence. Commit gaps use Rust elapsed timestamps; phase assignment uses journal monotonic timestamps. The gaps include each swipe’s settling period and are not display presentation FPS.

The separate video pass used tools/sample-grim-frames.sh, 15 seconds, minimum interval 0.5 seconds, provenance injected. It contains six theme drags, captured in 22 native frames. tools/encode-grim-samples.py preserves their recorded timing; see frames.tsv and encoding record. It demonstrates content and the loading failure, not smoothness. No camera or real-finger evidence is claimed.

Task 11.3 stays open: repair background selection, then repeat the warm browsing comparison with equivalent visible content and inspect the remaining rendering cost. The unchanged generation and inactive CPU at rest do not establish that carousel swipes meet a usable frame budget.