spend hours ricing my desktop and decided I hated it at the end, and ended up wiping my entire OS

https://lemmy.ca/post/53467064

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
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.
there’s accent colors too now
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.).
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.

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!

What does ricing mean in this context?
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?
I think its based off customizing cars in japan.
Not just desktop. Basically configuring any program or set of programs for aesthetics.
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.
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.

Urban Dictionary: riced out

riced out: Import vehicle that has been riced out typically has one too many mods that is only appealing to the owner of the vehicle. This includes body...

Urban Dictionary

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 it refers to a similar concept in the car modding scene.
I believe ricing roots from the derogatory word for Asian mod cars, known as ricers. Customizing or modding them was the deal.

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.
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

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.

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
Fun fact! It’s still racist.
It’s a racist term people used to refer to Japanese cars that have been “souped up”
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.

That wallpaper comes with Plasma

I discovered since using a tiling WM þis happens far, fast less frequently. Sometimes I change þe font in Polybar, but for me þe value of þe bar is in consistency and being able to find information at a glance, so I only rarely mess wiþ layout or widgets.

When þere’s very little to rice, you don’t waste time ricing.

Honestly I even get rid of the taskbar too. I’ll float the system tray at approximately the same place but either let it hide behind everything or fill the space above it with a specific window (mirrored phone screen) with fixed size. Now that I’m typing it out though, I’m going to investigate auto-hiding it until a keybind reveals it in front of all windows.

I switch programs exclusively with alt+tab regardless and KDE’s launcher fulfills the super-menu functionality. I want a fresh session login to open to just my wallpaper. No icons, no task bar, no tray, nothing. An anti-rizz if you will.

I like the aesthetic and see it as a (tongue-in-cheek) method of security by obfuscation. I pair that with completely blank keycaps on my keyboard and suddenly 99% of the population doesn’t know how to interact with my machine.

Dvorak will help up that percentage
Gotta aim for those 5 9’s of user lock-out!
My wife loves me despite my Dvorak. However in the pursuit of a happy marriage I’ve been forced to concede allowing qwerty on my desktop as a side option
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.

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 just have a heavily customised and themed KDE setup that I’ve been updating and bringing with me from machine to machine over the years, I’ve even set up all relevant dotfiles on a syncthing sync so any changes I make are reflected between my desktop and laptop

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

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:

  • 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-light makes everything light mode.
    • prefer-dark makes everything dark mode.
    • default makes apps light mode but the panel will stay dark.
  • If you insist on theming Libadwaita apps, put the theme in ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css. You can also have add an @import directive 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.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 GTK_THEME 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 except preventing you from changing the theme without restarting all your apps.