OpenRiot v8.0.7: Thirty-Two Walls

“The gallery had fifty pictures and one sentence to say. We took the sentence out of the crate, hung it in the middle, and let the rest of the frames find their own room. What stayed on the wall was not the loudest work. It was the work that survived being looked at twice.” – The OpenRiot Crew, v8.0.7

OpenRiot 8.0.7 is a deaccession notice with better lighting.

The wallpaper collection stops pretending that more is the same as better. Fifty images become thirty-two. Every survivor was rehung, reordered, and re-encoded, so the folder that ships is smaller than the one that came before it even though nothing was thrown away for being difficult to look at.

The intake desk also loosened its collar. openriot --convert-webp now accepts JPEG as well as PNG, because the world did not stop making JPEGs while we were busy renaming suffixes. libwebp joins the desktop package list so the converter has something to lean on when cwebp is the tool doing the work.

Total changes: one gallery cull, one rehang, one wider intake door, and a smaller suitcase.

The Deaccession

A wallpaper set grows the way a drawer grows. Somebody finds a good image, it gets a number, and the number is a promise that it will be there forever. Nothing in that arrangement asks the obvious question: is anybody still looking at this?

So the wall committee did the unfashionable thing and counted. Fifty numbered files, every one willing to render, none of them required to earn its place. The cut is not a judgment on the art. It is a judgment on the shelf. Thirty-two images fill a set without turning the picker into a filing cabinet, and thirty-two is enough for the rotation to feel like a rotation instead of a slideshow with a bad memory.

backgrounds/33.webp through backgrounds/50.webp are gone. The directory is tidier, the checkout is lighter, and nobody has to scroll past a wall they stopped noticing a year ago.

The Rehang

Deleting was the easy half. The surviving files were not merely left alone; they were put back in an order that reads.

The sequence now walks from the first frame to the last with some intent, and several images that used to sit near the end moved up because they belonged near the front. If you had a favorite number memorized, this release has opinions about your memory. The images are still in the box. The labels moved.

Encoding came next. The collection was re-optimized for WebP, and the difference is not subtle. One frame that used to weigh 734 KB now ships at 349 KB. Another went from 658 KB to 287 KB. Across the set, roughly 14.8 MB of wallpapers replace a folder that had grown comfortable at twice the weight. Same pictures, same colors, fewer bytes spent saying them.

No subscription, no cloud gallery, no “your wallpapers are available in the app.” A file on your disk, in your resolution, that survives the next reboot and the next company that decides wallpapers are a service. The wall does not need an account.

The Intake Desk

openriot --convert-webp was built for PNG and only PNG. That was a fine vow until someone handed it a JPEG.

The converter now globs *.png, *.jpg, and *.jpeg in both backgrounds/ and Locked/, strips whichever suffix it finds, and writes the .webp sibling. cwebp gets first refusal. If it cannot make the trip, ImageMagick’s convert still catches the fall, and the original is only removed after a successful conversion. A file that refuses to convert stays where it is and says so on stderr.

The command description grew a brace to match: backgrounds/ *.{png,jpg} and Locked/*.{png,jpg}, because a help string that lies is just a rumor with formatting.

install/packages.yaml now carries libwebp-1.6.0 in the desktop set. The converter had been calling cwebp and hoping the base system felt generous. Now the dependency is written down, installed on purpose, and less likely to be discovered missing at the worst possible moment.

🧾 Files Changed

File	Change
`backgrounds/01-32.webp`	Replaced, reordered, re-encoded
`backgrounds/33-50.webp`	Removed from the set
`source/imaging/webp.go`	Accept `.jpg`/`.jpeg`, strip all three
	suffixes, keep the ImageMagick fallback
`source/commands/commands.go`	`--convert-webp` help text matches
	what the command actually does
`install/packages.yaml`	`libwebp-1.6.0` for the converter
`install/openriot`	Rebuilt with the new set

🗣️ Final Words

“The wall is not a warehouse. It is a place you stand in front of and decide to stay. Thirty-two frames, hung with intent, lighter than the fifty that came before, and every one of them a file you own. The room got smaller. The view got better.” – The OpenRiot Crew, v8.0.7