I’ve seen this word “ricing” three times the past couple of days. It is yet another newfangled “cool” word? It sounds incredibly dumb, just like the vast majority of these kind of words are.
It’s an old term from the car customisation scene, but I’ve seen it in use for referring to custom desktop setups for more than 10 years now. The unixporn subreddit was the first place I ran into it.
i like a good galaxy/space wallpaper, done. files and folders accumulate as they will. a few functional things like one-click shutdown -h now // script. had to rip out a lot of distro cruft i don’t need. xfce on ubuntu. set and forget. good practice doing reinstalls
Default Plasma is just good.
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?
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.
Dumb question: What exactly is “ricing”? I’d also be curious to learn about the etymology of that term…
Incorrect, or dumb use of a term originating from modifying Japanese car to street racing, also racist term.
Occasionally people with backronym it as “race inspired cosmetic enhancements” so they can continue saying it with plausible deniability
That’s animal cruelty
Excessively modifying your system, most commonly in how it looks, spending dozens of hours making it look just right.
Not sure of etymology
The etymology is from a racist street racing term. In the street racing scene, the garishly over-done modifications (often combined with anime wraps) were popular in parts of Asia. So those styles of cars were referred to as “rice burners” when Asian drivers inevitably ended up at car meets. And modifying the car in such a way was called “ricing” it. As in, Asians eat a lot of rice, and it looks like an Asian modified that car.
That’s pretty much it. That’s the etymology. Some people will try to claim that “RICE” is actually an acronym. But that’s a common lie, to allow those people to continue using the racist term without feeling guilty. The term “rice burner” existed long before the backronym did. And somehow, the term eventually found its way into the Linux world. And Linux fanboys will screech about how it’s not a racist term, but it is.
The more I know, thanks!
you know the Fast and the Furious movies? at least the original 2 or 3, those cars were all tricked out with neon lights, decals, nitros, custom exhaust, all that? most of those cars were Japanese cars that were heavily modified. Basically it was a derogetory term for modifying a piece of shit car to look good, Especally if it was a Japanese car. you slap a body kit on it, neon lights, slap in some bucket seats, switch out the exhaust, but you dont’ touch the engine. that’s a “Ricer” it’s not a good thing in that specific car culture.
So for whatever reason someone at some point was modifying their Desktop Environment or Window Manager with neon borders and all that and decided to call it a Rice. You’re essentially modifying your OS without touching the “engine” so to speak. You’re just slapping a body kit, neon lights, some bucket seats etc onto your operating system.
Read the same in the past. If I remember correctly, someone added “Ricer” and “Rice” is racism, too.
yeah some consider it a racist term because it originally applied specifically to Japanese Cars. i.e. Asian cars, Asians like eating Rice, POS modified Car isn’t a “Racer” it’s a “Ricer”.
I once had to explain to my father why calling Asian sport bikes “rice rockets” is racist. He didn’t get it and went on to talk about how he got “gyped” by a guy trying to sell him one when he was in his 30s.
It takes a lot of introspection and work to get past culturally ingrained bigotry. I was a teenager in the 90s. Back then, and still through the 2000’s via internet culture, everyone and everything was a “fag”. I didn’t recognize that it was a problem until way later than I should have, and I still almost say it sometimes. I don’t have any problem with gay people. It’s just a weird form of muscle memory. People don’t understand that listeners don’t know what their intentions are. They just know what you said. You gotta internalize that fact before you can change your language.
It’s one of those things, is it worse that it’s used without understanding that it was initially a racist term?
Good question. It was the late 90s so it wasn’t like we were living in Jim Crow but there was no where near the same amount of recognition of the difficulties people of color face like we see now. He never intentionally racist. On the contrary, I do remember him spending a night in the drunk tank after got into a parking lot brawl between him and Puerto Rican friends and some assholes who called them a bunch of slurs.
So what’s the American or European equivalent? Potatoing? Corning?
Corning sounds kinky
Fried rice?
As I understand it, ricing a machine is to excessively modify it to achieve more speed, users of Gentoo being the origina ricers in the Linux world.
The term itself has dubious and arguably racist origins, in the world of modification of Japanese cars for street racing.
Isn’t ricing when you make a car look fast when it’s actually just a piece of shit? That’s how I’ve always heard it used until linux nerds started applying it to their GUI systems.
I thought ricing was when asian street food vendors would make their small food carts all fancy looking?
Hey linuxmemes, I’ve got a question, can I straight up install linux on a windows computer and have access to all my files as they’ve been laid out by windows, or am I going to have to use an external backup to move my files ‘out of windows’ and ‘into linux’?
Like I’m getting sicker and sicker of windows pulling their whole attitude of " Weve got an update for you, give us all your data. Give it. What do you mean “right to privacy”? That’s only for companies and billionaires."
The answers might have confused you due to the unfortunate phrasing of the question. Let me clarify:
-Linux installation requires a separate partition. This can be your D:/ drive from Windows, a completely new physical drive, or a partition you free up on any drive using the Windows Disk Management. -This partition will be wiped upon installation. Back everything up from there. -All other partitions, including drive C:/, will be fully accessible from Linux. -Your Linux partition will not be visible from Windows. There are ways to interact with it from there, but they are neither convenient nor fully functional, and you probably shouldn’t rely on it.
Overall, it’s always a good strategy to back up everything important before installing a new system or reinstalling old one, but you probably know this already and this is not a strict technical requirement - just a peace of mind tip.
Many linux installers give you the option of using the free space in your Windows drive for a linux partition (Linux mint is one example). Then you would have what is called a dual boot setup. It means every time you start your computer, you can choose Linux or Windows.
Then you disable bitlocker in your windows partition, and you can access all the files there from linux.
You can access bitlocker drives from Linux too, it’s a bit of a pain but all you need is the recovery key.
If all of your partitions are in a single NTFS drive it probably wise to make a backup, if it in a separate drive you can access it in Linux (read only, if you want to write into it you need to install “ntfs-3g” package)
Contrary to other comments, it’s actually pretty common and easy to install Linux alongside Windows, if you have a harddrive big enough for both. If you want to have both installed, it is recommend to start with Windows because Linux boot loader can recognise Windows partition and integrate it with no problem. And Linux natively supports ntfs so you can seamlessly access all your files absolutely no problem. But if it’s your first time installing Linux it’s easy to mess up and kill the windows partition if you aren’t good with terminology yet, so backing up all your files is not just recommended but straight up required.
You’ll need to migrate your files somehow. Installing linux over windows generally entails reformatting, which will erase everything.
Much better to install Linux, install a virtual machine (GNOME Boxes) in which you run what you still need Windows for, and access files via a Samba service as shared files.
Or just switch to Linux, and copy your files. It is good for daily use.
Generally, no. You can’t install Linux onto a Windows filesystem (NTFS). What you can do is one of these things:
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Back up the files you care about (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, whatever) in Google Drive, Dropbox, a thumb drive or anywhere else that you can access later. Then you can tell the Linux installer to wipe Windows and afterwards put your important files back.
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If you have a spare SSD you can put Linux on that. Then you can access the Windows drive from Linux. You might have to install an NTFS driver first, and you will definitely need to configure Windows to shut down properly instead of secretly hibernating, because that leaves the filesystem in a weird state and Linux won’t be able to open it.
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If you don’t have a spare SSD you can still do the same trick by shrinking the Windows/NTFS filesystem and installing Linux in the now-free space on the same drive. Among Sysadmins shrinking filesystems has a bad reputation because at least historically it could (rarely) fail and destroy all your data, so I would not recommend you do it but it is possible and in most cases it works without issues.
Each of these comes with some risk - You might forget to copy over important files onto your thumb drive, or you might make a mistake in the Linux installer and accidentally delete Windows when you didn’t mean to. That said you should already have a backup strategy, because your PC could also just spontaneously die and lose the data even if you do nothing. If you have backups and you’ve tested them to know that you really can restore all the files you care about, then even that first option stops looking very scary.
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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.
there’s accent colors too now
I do the same but I also make sure the panel’s on the top edge of the screen
And autohide!
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
You set a wallpaper?
I don’t know when I last saw my wallpaper xD
Same. Changed my wallpaper to just the color black for that reason.
tiling window manager moment
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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You made your bed, and have been laying in it. A man of virtue.
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
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
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.
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
