OpenRiot v7.9.55 — The Machine Sweats the Details

“The battery said 5% when it was full. The Wi-Fi said ‘Connected’ when it was lying. The media player put dialogue in one ear and explosions in the other. The file manager had a search bar nobody asked for. The VPN worked on 7.9 and broke on 8.0. None of these were big problems. None of them were glamorous. All of them were wrong. We fixed them. The machine is less annoying. The Turing Police would call them ‘minor quality-of-life improvements.’ We call them things that should have been right the first time.” — The OpenRiot Crew, v7.9.55

Release Overview

Five small fixes that make the machine less annoying. The battery stops lying during power transitions. The Wi-Fi TUI verifies you actually got online. The media player mixes to stereo. The file manager drops its search bar. WireGuard DNS keeps working on 8.0 even when resolvd ignores proposals.

Total changes: 5 fixes, 45 lines.

🔋 Battery: No False Alarms

When the battery is full and you toggle between charging and mobile, apm -m sometimes returns a stale or zero value during the transition. The old code saw “0 minutes” and fired the critical 5-minute warning on a full battery.

The new code checks the battery percentage before alerting. If you’re above 25%, no alert fires regardless of what apm -m reports. The machine stops crying wolf.

🔌 Wi-Fi TUI: Trust But Verify

The network TUI used to say “Connected” as soon as the interface came up. If you typed the wrong password, it still said “Connected” — the interface was associated but DHCP never completed. You’d only find out when your browser didn’t load.

The new code waits three seconds for DHCP, then pings cdn.openbsd.org twice. If the ping fails, you get “no internet — wrong password or DHCP failure.” If it succeeds, the connection is real. No more lying.

🎵 mpv: Stereo by Default

mpv was decoding surround tracks and doing a bad downmix — dialogue in the left channel, music and effects in the right. The new default config sets audio-channels=stereo so all tracks mix properly to both channels. Installed as ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf and preserved if you already have one.

🗂️ Thunar: Search Bar Removed

The toolbar search bar was there by default. Nobody asked for it. It’s gone. The last-toolbar-items config now has search:0 instead of search:1.

🔒 WireGuard DNS: Resolvd Workaround

On OpenBSD 8.0-beta, resolvd ignores route nameserver proposals from wg-quick. When WireGuard came up, DNS stayed on the router’s nameserver — unreachable through the tunnel. Internet was dead.

The fix appends the WireGuard DNS to /etc/resolv.conf directly, then restarts resolvd so it treats the line as a user-edited entry and preserves it. On teardown, wg-quick restores the pre-VPN resolv.conf and we restart resolvd again. This works on both 7.9 and 8.0.

🧾 Files Changed

File	Change
`source/battery/battery.go`	Alerts now require `percent < 25`
	and `minutes > 0`. Prevents false
	warnings during AC/battery transitions.
`source/nmtui/update.go`	After connect, waits 3s then pings
	`cdn.openbsd.org`. Reports failure if
	ping doesn’t respond.
`source/wireguard/wireguard.go`	`Start()` appends DNS to resolv.conf
	and restarts resolvd. `Stop()`
	restarts resolvd after tunnel down.
	`getDNSFromConfig()` parses DNS
	from wg0.conf.
`config/mpv/mpv.conf`	NEW — `audio-channels=stereo` for
	proper surround downmix.
`install/packages.yaml`	Adds mpv.conf to media module
	configs with `preserve_if_exists`.
`config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-`	`search:1` → `search:0` in
`perchannel-xml/thunar.xml`	Thunar toolbar items.

🗣️ Final Words

“Five fixes. None of them were the kind of problem you file a bug report about. The battery warning that made you panic for no reason. The Wi-Fi that said it was connected when it wasn’t. The movie that sounded like it was mixed by someone who hated you. The search bar you never used. The VPN that broke between versions. You lived with them. You shouldn’t have had to. The machine is less annoying now. The Turing Police would say ‘five minor fixes.’ We say the difference between good and great is the things you don’t notice because they’re not wrong anymore.” — The OpenRiot Crew, v7.9.55