I used to be like that, nowadays I just choose a distro that comes with a DE I like out of the box, switch to dark mode, set a wallpaper and call it a day.
I do the same but I also make sure the panel’s on the top edge of the screen
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I’ve already got browser tabs on the side most of the time
Why not both?
Auto-hiding on the seam between my two monitors for me.
You set a wallpaper?
I don’t know when I last saw my wallpaper xD
tiling window manager moment
Same. Changed my wallpaper to just the color black for that reason.
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I used to skin Windows XP and loved custom icon packs for OS X. Today I run Gnome with the bare minimum quality of life extensions.
I was going to say I don’t have time to mess around with that shit, and then remembered I have spent a bunch of time curating my dotfiles and the actual OS I run is a Bootc image I build nightly on my self hosted Forgejo instance. I may actually have too much time on my hands 😅
My PC at the time couldn’t handle the skins in XP. I was sad.
It really didn’t like KDE. I never got on with gnome. Don’t ask me why, it was 20+ years ago!
I changed the font size in Linux Mint. Does that count?
Are you the hacker we keep reading about in the newspaper?
Yes. My name is 4chan.
5 hours? … You have much to learn, padawan.
rookie number i know but I don’t wanna waste anymore time than I already did, gotta spend those time for DE/WM hopping :P
What does ricing mean in this context?
The term also confuses me. What does customising a desktop have to do with rice? Is it like beads to decorate stuff? Maybe “beading” would have a bad interpretation, but rice is just confusing.
Uhmmmm, pretty sure it’s worse than that. My understanding of the term is that it comes from cars, where cheaper Asian cars were entering the American market and were called “rice burners” (racistly), and I’m pretty sure from there the concept of decking out a cheap car with spoilers and ground kits and a wild paint job and stuff was called “ricing” because it was a thing in the Asian communities. As in “ricing a car” is “doing what an Asian would do to that car, and you know how they’re all about rice”
I’d be happy to be wrong here… but I think that’s the history on that word.
Makes sense! So, it’s a pejorative and we probably shouldn’t use it?
I am old enough that the term would make me uncomfortable to use, yeah. Imagine my surprise when all the Linux vids use it.
Im old. It used to be derogatory against imported cars to North America. Rice Racers meant Japanese imports that were modified.
But the meaning or rather the connotation has changed. It now is more related to the cooking term of ricing, where you pass a vegetable through a ricer to break it into rice sized pieces. You rice your PC by tuning all the pieces and making minute tweaks.
As another commentor added the RICE term for cars is now a backcronym of Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements
Your 100% correct. I just point to early Fast and Furious movies.
I believe ricing roots from the derogatory word for Asian mod cars, known as ricers. Customizing or modding them was the deal.
It is an extension/evolution of the idea of ricing cars. Originally it was something like Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements. Basically stuff that makes your car look “racier”/faster, but does nothing for performance.
Edit to add - That is probably backronym to cover up for the mostly racist origination of that term. I can’t be sure.
100% a backronym. Ricer came from rice burner, a pejorative term for Asian cars.
But its use has changed a lot in the decades since.
Originally it was something like Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements.
I think this is a bit of a backronym, as it refers more to “import” vehicles from Japan.
I believe it refers to a similar concept in the car modding scene.
Customizing the appearance of the desktop, for example with custom themes, widgets that show various stats etc etc
Not just desktop. Basically configuring any program or set of programs for aesthetics.
Ah, thank you! I was thinking like a potato ricer? Making it smooth?
I think its based off customizing cars in japan.
It’s a racist term people used to refer to Japanese cars that have been “souped up”
I keep telling myself I’m gonna rice out my setup. That plasma is just a placeholder. But as months have become years I have started to question the value in it.
I started with gnome and a handful of plugins to make it more like how I was used to, but over the years I pretty much just use stock, because once I got used to it it is just good by itself. Except for GTile. I still like to install GTile.
I’ve never bothered because less than 1% of my time I’m looking at the sys UI, let alone the desktop.
I remember picking nice desktop backgrounds and even downloading gigabytes thereof, sorting and categorizing them, only to notice that my windows were fullscreen all the time anyway. Now I just have a background to indicate that at least some things work because a black background would mean trouble (file missing etc.).
It’s different to work with than just about any Linux distro out there, but <doing anything then regretting it> works kinda well with NixOS. Sure it’s different than all the other Linux distros and prob has a steeper learning curve as well - but once you get into it you’ll never have to reinstall again, you can apply any config with 1 command, revert to earlier build-versions if a change would break the system. Great stuff!
I’m on the verge of swapping off windows 10 to Nobara. Besides this comment do you have any points that could sway me toward Nix?
Personally I probably wouldn’t advise NixOS to someone new to Linux. I think it’s best to get familiar with how linux does things in a more conventional setup first. And then transition to a declarative setup. But it kinda depends on the person as well, and how willing they are to learn and how comfortable they are with writing such a config.
That said, I would be very curious how the switch straight from Windows to NixOS would be experienced by someone. So if you do so, feel free to post your experience on the NixOS community :)
I do agree with what @Decq@lemmy.world said. For most users is preferable to start of with a simpler distro. The biggest difference between other distros and NixOS is its declarative nature, and that its config files are written in the functional language Nix. This will most likely feel overwhelming, especially if your not accustomed to functional languages.
I think a better approach would be to go with the distro you mentioned, then when you gotten more used to the ins and out, perhaps have a look at installing Nix the package manager in Nobara (the same name as the language is confusion), or perhaps Home Manager. The later manage programs and config also declaratively, but only for users and not on a system level.
All in all, in most use cases NixOS and its declarative, immutable, reproducable and indestructive model is overkill. Its mostly only worth it if you have multiple computers that need to share config, systems that must work 100% of the time or if you’re a sucker for declarative approaches (like i am, i’ve also daily driven Linux for 18 years, and is a hobby programmer, so it was a lot easier to get into Nix/NixOS with that I think).
CachyOS has been great if anyone is looking for an arch based distro that’s preconfigured for gaming out of the box.
CachyOS and Bazzite are perfect for gaming out of the box
Agree 100%. My only hesitation with bazzite is fedora’s insistence that 32bit needs to go. Once that support ends, bazzite is on a death clock. Otherwise I’d say bazzite over cachy.
Default Plasma is just good.
fluxbox, ftw.
wonder what eventually makes everyone ragequit on the ricing part lol
for me? it was the battery management and suspend/hibernate stuff. You need to do a lot of weird file configs to get them working.
I riced i3wm, dwm and even exwm and suspend/hibernate problem would pop up now and then.
On a full DE? Shit just works.
I do miss ricing though. Especially window managers, I can just git clone my dotfiles and have everything setup in seconds.
The first time you do a presentation and forget how to add an external display, that was what made me stick with a full DE.
A lot of it seems like removing the automated easy parts to customize it to be faster only to realize you don’t feel like spending time on that breaking or being so inflexible. Like I can switch to lxqt but now it doesn’t even feel like I have a complete desktop and are spending time making it work instead of just using it
I got out of customizing everything once I started flashing different ROMs on my first smartphone, which was the Verizon Thunderbolt
After having three or four different operating systems on in one week, it became so obvious how much time I was wasting on that stuff lol
XFCE + Compiz was 100% worth the effort of doing it once and then being able to just copy to a new device.
Waiting for XFCE to complete their Wayland transition, and I’m gonna upgrade to Wayfire.
That being said, yeah I give KDE to basically everyone else new to Linux lol
I agree that KDE is better for newcomers. I’ll never understand why the newbie-friendly distros tend to favor GNOME.
It’s a lowest common denominator kinda issue, methinks. Gnome is chasing it’s own tail trying to create a single UI that will please everyone, plus have it simple to use and both similar enough yet distinct enough to/from Windows/Mac experiences. It’s a noble enough goal - but honestly strikes me as well impossible.
KDE gives you a barely updated Win95 era desktop and then becomes a tinkerer’s paradise - whenever there was two or more options, they focused on making each available, but neither becomes the default.
Before Ubuntu existed, most distros aimed at newcomers shipped with KDE as the default. I’m not sure why Ubuntu went with GNOME as the default, but since Ubuntu came out, everything shifted to GNOME.
GNOME is definitely not going for a single UI that will please everyone. They’re going for a UI that you WILL use THEIR way, or else. And they WILL break any extensions you use within the next release or two. Which is an odd design philosophy for a desktop for an OS aimed at people who like to tweak.
Ubuntu was originally the Linux for people who can’t tweak
Ubuntu originally came out because Debian Sarge took much longer than usual to get released, and everything in Debian Woody was woefully out of date in 2004. KDE 3 and GNOME 2 had been out for a while but the latest Debian was shipping KDE 2.2.2 and GNOME 1.4. Ubuntu’s philosophy was to provide a more up-to-date distro for regular people.
I’ve been using Linux long enough that I used Debian Woody.
While gnomes simplicity looks better for newcomers, it’s actually worse, I hated it, tried kde, loved it, later tried gnome again and swapped to it, had more appeal once I already was using linux and used to it. It’s not immediately obvious what extensions to use and where to get them or that they even are a thing you can do. You goto settings and get turned off by the lack of customizability you’ve been hearing about.
Yeah, and the GNOME team sees people using extensions, breaks them, and says “No, you WILL use it OUR way or else!”
Whenever I’ve tried GNOME, I’d say about 75% of the extensions I’ve seen recommended as recently as a year prior were now broken on the latest release. And apparently GNOME really hates the idea of a systray/AppIndicator even though most distros and users want it, other desktops have it, and Mac and Windows have it
Same experience, thought desktop on linux was behind because I started on Ubuntu with GNOME.
Luckily tried XFCE on someone’s Debian install and realized GNOME just kinda sucked.
Even GNOME 2 was a pretty standard DE, 3 and 40+ just took a weird nosedive where they enforced their idea of the perfect DE, despite it breaking a ton of rules about good UX and removing a bunch of former features.
Oh man, old school Compiz with the wobbly windows and a million other tricks absolutely blew my mind. Magic rainbow spark particles when I minimize a window? Yes please! Fire trail that follows the cursor? No problem!
Some times it isn’t about the destination, but about the journey itself.
















