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’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.).
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
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
right or left edge for me, gotta maximize that vertical space
I’ve already got browser tabs on the side most of the time
Based
there’s accent colors too now
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.
fluxbox, ftw.
You guys set a different wallpaper?
Honestly, usually the only thing I HAVE to change. Idk why all the default distro wallpapers suck
They do don’t they.
It’s my biggest complaint about Linux, and on-boarding new users.
The last thing a new user should see is some janky ass looking wallpaper.
I think ElementaryOS and maybe Zorin were the only two that had clean looking OOTB theme and wallpaper.
Does setting it to a solid color counts?
Most solid color wallpapers are included as default on DEs, so no.
all 16 777 216 colors, actually
looks good
*intensely ricing
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.
What does ricing mean in this context?
It’s a racist term people used to refer to Japanese cars that have been “souped up”
Customizing the appearance of the desktop, for example with custom themes, widgets that show various stats etc etc
Ah, thank you! I was thinking like a potato ricer? Making it smooth?
Not just desktop. Basically configuring any program or set of programs for aesthetics.
RICE is a post-hoc acronym (backronym) meaning Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement. Its from car communities.
It used to be a racist term referring to the modification of JDM vehicles, hence the post-hoc change to the definition. Its a word that came into common parlance without folks completely knowing it was racist.
Fun fact! It’s still racist.
It also means to break something up into tiny parts for cooking through a ricer. Which can also be applied to ricing your computer by tweaking all the little parts
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.
Your 100% correct. I just point to early Fast and Furious movies.
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
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.
I believe it refers to a similar concept in the car modding scene.
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 faster, but does nothing for performance.
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.
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.
I believe ricing roots from the derogatory word for Asian mod cars, known as ricers. Customizing or modding them was the deal.
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 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
how is rice racist i’m so confused
Same, I’m not a native English speaker, so I only know it used for the food. Never heard intim an offensive or racial context.
My guess is that it’s associated with Asia and as such used with an implied offensive meaning (maybe something along „you rice eater“)?
yeah i thought the same thing. nobody answered me yet tho so i guess we’ll never know
edit: ok i’ve discovered it. apparently it initially meant something about modding cars that were imported from asia. i’m not sure if i got that part correctly. then people started using the term rice to mean modding cars in general, and the linux/unix community started using the word to mean editting/modding the computer’s UI.
so basically it originally was racist, but now it just means modding, so i don’t see how it could be considered racist.
There are two meanings to that word and it’s crucial we know exactly which one we are using.
Galaxy brain: upvoting all the posts that use “customizing” or any of the other perfectly viable alternatives
… there is only one
Let me introduce you ti: declarative package management and guix
Not worth it and you will spend all your time on fighting the system instead of using it.
I spend 3 days ricing my desktop and I did not finish. I’ve now been sitting with the ugliest half riced desktop for 6 months. I decided to go with a light theme in beige and its… not good.
You made your bed, and have been laying in it. A man of virtue.
I grabbed like 3 apps to apply themes and icons on gnome and got confused trying to pick the best option
GNOME theming discussions are weird. A lot of people will peddle cargo culted bad (broken) approaches when asked about it, but honestly it’s not that complicated¹, just restrictive:
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Use
gsettings [get|set] org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme [new value]to set the theme that GTK3 apps will load. Libadwaita apps will ignore this setting. -
Use
gsettings [get|set] org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme [prefer-light|prefer-dark|default]to control whether Libadwaita apps (and GNOME shell) will display in dark mode. GTK3 apps will ignore this setting.prefer-lightmakes everything light mode.prefer-darkmakes everything dark mode.defaultmakes apps light mode but the panel will stay dark.
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If you insist on theming Libadwaita apps, put the theme in
~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css. You can also have add an@importdirective there to import a theme. Note that this file is only loaded at startup, so using this feature means that GTK4 apps can no longer respond to the dark mode toggle.²
All of the applications that promise to help in theming GTK/GNOME (regardless of whether you’re talking about Tweaks, Refine, the theming settings of other DEs, Gradience, etc.) just flip some combination of these settings, mostly the first two.³
¹ It might seem complicated based on the length of this comment, but trust me that Qt is worse.
² The newest GTK version has media selectors, so if all of your applications are already updated to use the new GTK and your theme is updated to use media selectors then dark mode toggles should actually work now. Mine unfortunately haven’t.
³ A handful (mostly random scripts from GitHub, but also more reputable stuff like
home-manager) will also try some wrong ways:-
Setting the
GTK_THEMEenvironment variable will prevent applications from loading the default Adwaita stylesheet completely, which will break all kinds of things. -
You can also put a theme at
~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css, but this does nothing you can’t do withgsettingsexcept preventing you from changing the theme without restarting all your apps.
The issue is that the GNOME devs have made it VERY clear that they don’t want you doing this.
Yes, that is true. Curiously Qt kind of has the opposite problem of trying to be too flexible, and we have like four theming engines of which only one actually works (and it’s the one that’s tied to the Plasma desktop). GTK4 + Libadwaita is at least consistent in that it supports basically nothing.
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