Two guards that checked something other than the state they were protecting.
Section 17 skipped the entire remote desktop setup when `dpkg -s ubuntu-desktop`
succeeded, treating one package being present as proof that seven steps of
configuration had run. A host can have ubuntu-desktop and still be missing GDM
auto-login, the forced Xorg session, the captured EDID and its kernel command
line, and the login-time mode setter — which is exactly what this machine was
on 2026-08-02, while the guard cheerfully reported "skip". setup-desktop.sh is
idempotent throughout, so the guard bought nothing and cost a converged host.
The starship step had the opposite bug: it cp'd over ~/.config/starship.toml on
every run, so a customised config was silently destroyed. The nvim step two
sections down already guards on its config's existence; this now matches, and
distinguishes "absent" (deploy) from "identical" (skip) from "yours differs"
(keep, and say how to take ours).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
593bcc1575