The 0.x line of Avocado Desktop, from the first macOS host through the Tauri rebuild.

The first macOS host

Avocado Desktop began as a macOS menu-bar app (LSUIElement, no Dock icon, macOS 14+) that owns the local Avocado environment so the CLI doesn't have to:

• Owns the local QEMU VM — spawns qemu-system-aarch64, holds it in a starting state until the guest agent responds, then tracks its lifecycle.
• USB pass-through — an IOKit watcher drives a SUID-root AvocadoUSBIPHelper that speaks the USB/IP wire protocol on TCP 3240, with per-device routing and stuck-attach detection.
• Talks to the CLI over IPC — a JSON-line socket handling vm.status / vm.start / vm.stop / vm.wait_ready, plus a Mac↔in-VM control plane over virtio-serial.
• Dashboard + provisioning — Overview / USB Devices / Projects / Settings / Events / Help panes, a menu-bar controller with live VM/USB/container status, and a serial-monitor-backed provisioning flow.
• Centralized logging under ~/Library/Logs/Avocado/ with rotation.

Agent chat and an MCP host

• Agent chat panel — a right-side chat surface (⌘⇧A) backed by an agent that speaks Zed's Agent Client Protocol, folded into the main dashboard window.
• MCP host server on 127.0.0.1:11551, reachable from inside the VM at 10.0.2.2 via QEMU's user-mode NAT. Its tools let an agent drive the host: run_avocado_cli (delegate avocado invocations with the user's own CLI, config, and credentials), await_avocado_cli, scheduled follow-ups rendered as cancelable pills, plus navigate, notify_chat, list_serial_devices, and project-lifecycle tools.
• avocado-mcp bridge — an in-process proxy that spawns the avocado-mcp npm package so its tools share the same transport as the host tools.
• YAML config view — a syntax-colored avocado.yaml editor with clickable cross-references between runtime and extension definitions.
• VM lifecycle follows the CLI — with avocado-cli 0.40 owning the QEMU lifecycle, the supervisor treats the CLI's pidfile as source of truth, fixing orphaned QEMU processes.

An editor and project management

• Monaco editor pane — replaces the read-only YAML viewer with Monaco in a WKWebView (custom avocado theme, file tree, Cmd+S write-through).
• Project management — a Blank project flow (avocado init), rename / duplicate with in-flight-run guards, and import of external folders (with a non-destructive "remove from list").
• MCP + target picker — the target picker and MCP list_targets honor AVOCADO_REPO_URL, and run_avocado_cli redirects install/build/provision to run_project_action instead of running silently in the background.

Rebuilt on Tauri

0.4.0 rebuilds the desktop on Tauri (it was SwiftUI). The bundle identifier and DMG URL are unchanged, so installing over a 0.3.x install replaces the app in place and carries settings forward. Sparkle is retired — the Tauri updater is now the only auto-update channel, so 0.3.x installs must upgrade manually once.

• Updates pane in Settings — installed-vs-latest for avocado-cli, the Avocado VM, and the desktop itself, with one-click in-app updates.
• Getting Started checklist on the Overview pane.
• System-first, bundled-fallback CLI resolution — prefers the user's $PATH avocado so the desktop matches Terminal, falling back to a bundled sidecar.

Notable fixes across 0.x

• Launch on non-developer machines (0.2.1) — dropped a forward-declared system-extension entitlement that had no bundled provisioning profile, which had blocked launch for every Homebrew-cask user.
• CLI binary override, auto-relaunch, and $PATH augmentation (0.4.2) — point at a dev avocado build, updates now relaunch instead of hanging, and a Finder-launched app finds npx/node/brew.
• USB helper SUID packaging (0.4.4, critical) — the published DMG's AvocadoUSBIPHelper was missing its SUID-root bit (an unprivileged ditto dropped it during CI packaging), so USB/IP attach silently failed on 0.4.0–0.4.3. CI now stages with sudo ditto and fails loud if the bit is missing. Users on 0.4.0–0.4.3 should upgrade to 0.4.4.