why you should switch to linux and the amazing universe of linux "ricing"

[nolove]

greetings and salutations,

it is i, adron the arkay'zr, aka numbpilled voidrane, or even the lugubrious SPLICER SCORN-

i am here from the far reaches of a world so cold and grey to bring you the fantastic news about linux, arch linux, how to bypass the technicalities of installing arch linux, and finally..... dun dun DUN... LINUX RICING!!

hooray!~

let us begin with the WHY- why should you switch to linux..?

well, in my opinion, which is only one of very many- linux became the only logical answer as soon as microsoft began bombarding 'legacy' users with popup menus upon the starting and stopping of their personal computer imploring them that it is time to update or upgrade or otherwise somehow 'cought it up' and pay them varying amounts of money in order to use what, in my opinion- should already belong to the user in the first place!!

if my rambling dictum is too poetically word-salad-y, i am referring to the following:



it's obscene!

this and this alone should be a heralding moment that will most likely create one of the single largest migrations from windows to linux in the history of anything ever.

what is linux?

windows and mac are polished cages. comfortable. padded. curated. they hide the wires because they do not want you to touch them. linux hands you the wires and asks if you are brave enough to reroute the current. every time you step into a terminal you are cutting out the middleman and talking straight to the hardware. you are closer to the pulse of the machine, closer to the truth of computation, closer to that feeling of total ownership that corporate operating systems pretend does not exist.

short explanations for the main distros:

ubuntu: the default gateway into linux. big, soft, friendly, and everywhere. if linux had a welcome mat, it would be ubuntu.

debian: the monastery. stable, ancient, disciplined. packages move slowly because the monks must approve each one.

arch: the forge. everything is sharp and hot and loud. you build your own weapon and learn every part of it. bleeding edge, no apologies.

endeavourOS: arch with a seatbelt. same machine, fewer scars. perfect for people who want power without the migraine.

manjaro: arch with training wheels that sometimes wobble on their own. friendly, polished, occasionally chaotic.

fedora: the research lab. red hat’s experimental playground. modern. fast. very clean.

opensuse: the green control panel. for people who want god-tier configuration tools without having to write a treatise in bash.

gentoo: the pilgrimage. compile everything yourself. wait hours. transcend time. question your choices. achieve enlightenment.

void linux: minimalism sharpened into a blade. independent, efficient, fast boots, no systemd. for the real operators.

pop!_os: ubuntu’s caffeinated cousin built for creators, devs, and gpu monsters. clean, modern, gets out of your way.

nixos: the time machine. a fully declarative system where every configuration is a snapshot carved in stone.

if you are an absolute beginner to the world of linux, check out linux mint, it is easy, and shows you the linux experience in a non overwhelming way. if youre like me and want the most control, arch linux is king, but it is rather overwhelming to install it at first as it is a ton of command-line entrenchment that sometimes breaks and you have to start over... that is why endeavour os exists, it removes that part entirely replacing it with a gui, so people can use arch and not suffer initially.

LINUX RICING:

linux ricing is the process of customizing your desktop environment or window manager so it looks and behaves exactly the way you want. it goes far beyond changing a wallpaper. ricing involves modifying themes, system colors, icons, fonts, window borders, panels, widgets, and even the way your system handles animations or keyboard shortcuts. the goal is to build a workflow and visual style that supports how you think and work.





the practical benefit is that ricing forces you to learn how your system fits together. when you change your bar, you learn how it pulls data. when you install a window manager, you learn how it controls windows. when you customize notifications, you learn how different services talk to each other. this knowledge makes you more confident and self sufficient in linux.

rice setups range from minimal tiling window managers with no icons at all, to elaborate desktop environments full of custom widgets and visual effects. popular tools for ricing include window managers like i3, hyprland, openbox, and bspwm, launchers like rofi and wofi, and bars like waybar and polybar. people also rice full desktop environments like kde plasma or gnome, using theme engines and extensions.

in the end, ricing is simply personalizing your system so it feels efficient, comfortable, and yours. it is both an aesthetic exercise and a way to understand your computer on a deeper level.


the holy grail of system customization; EWW.

eww, short for elkowar’s wacky widgets, is a toolkit that lets you build your own desktop widgets using simple markup, css, and small scripts. instead of depending on whatever your desktop environment gives you, eww lets you create exactly the components you want. system monitors, music controls, weather panels, todo lists, notifications, dashboards, anything you can imagine. if it can output data, eww can display it.

the power of eww comes from how flexible it is. every widget is built from your own code, so it can look and behave however you want. you are not limited to stock designs or someone else's idea of a workspace. you can build a bar that shows only the information you care about, or a floating panel that appears when you press a key, or a full desktop dashboard that tracks your system in real time.

data driven widgets are especially valuable. they let you bring live information into your workflow instead of switching apps or digging for it. a custom eww widget can pull battery readings, cpu temperature, calendar events, rss feeds, spotify metadata, git status, or anything else you can access with a command. this creates a workspace that reacts to your habits and needs.

creating your own widgets also teaches you how your system works behind the scenes. you gain a better understanding of shell commands, json parsing, timers, async scripts, and service interaction. over time, your widgets become a personal library of tools that support exactly how you like to work.

with eww, your desktop stops being a passive environment and becomes something dynamic. the more you customize it, the more it starts to feel like a system built for you, by you.

the only limit is your imagination.

i hope this is somehow valuable to someone, as i felt like i had found a secret treasure of some sort that satiated my need to customize EVERYTHING to such a high degree, i just had to share it with someone. if you already use linux, please post your desktop in the comments, i would love to see your setups!~

[lakes]

thanks for the explanation of what eww is. i'm new to linux, so i didn't know how to make your own custom widgets. but i'll try to look into it because xfce doesn't have many widgets by default & i dislike conky for being hard to move around

[GideonWilhelm]

I have been *loving* linux mint, but man do I miss KDE Plasma on here.  Cinnamon just does not have the same level of customization.  Granted, I have found some extensions to make it nice and pretty for my purposes, mainly with some 'burn my windows' effects that make windows flicker in and out of existence with an almost cyberpunk-style glitch effect.  Windows could never be bothered to make desktop computing fun anymore!

[oldmurray34]

I switched to Linux previous year, stumbled and kickflipped down the rabbit hole of ricing. I have started with a humble Cinnamon (on a Mint) and KDE plasma with some custom niceties, now I marvel a creation of my own making: hyprland, arch (btw), consistent color pallets everywhere, consistent fonts, an army of bash scripts I have written for various stuff (from switching sound outputs with a quick button, to generating color pallets and multi stage scripts to switch workspaces in a very specific manner).

But ramble aside, I have also tried EWWW and I kind of prefer QuickShell. For some reason the syntax seemed more intuitive to me, I even coded an entire dashboard thing with calendar, clock, multimedea, touch controls, etc. for my small 11" touchscreen, which was leftover from my other tech project. I also have been looking at what people do with QuickShell and it's crazy: they create their own suit of GUI widgets for controlling every facet of their system, while being an eye candy.

Some examples:
https://github.com/caelestia-dots/shell
https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell

[HisVirusness]

Personally, I never seriously get beyond the stock tools when it comes to desktop customization.  Since I use Plasma on all my machines, I never really felt the need to go beyond that.  But if you're maining awesome or i3, I could see why something like EWW would be indispensable.

[virtualpet2001]

I want to try out Linux but I don't have anywhere to backup my files at the moment before i install it u_u I do have a harddrive with tons of space but it already has a lot of stuff on it and im not sure what to do about that, or even what I should back up in the first place...im a noob!!!

[AbsurdPirate]

I started using linux in 2020. While I've used various distros over those years, I haven't looked back to wanting to use windows since.

I use Arch BTW ;)

[myladon]

ive been meaning to switch but there are still programs that refuse to work on linux. BYOND (what space station 13 runs on), Autodesk AutoCAD and other stuff. its just held together with ducktape all around AND THE NVIDIA DRIVERS RAH I HATE THEM THEY DONT EVEN WORK PROPERLY

[HisVirusness]

I want to try out Linux but I don't have anywhere to backup my files at the moment before i install it u_u I do have a harddrive with tons of space but it already has a lot of stuff on it and im not sure what to do about that, or even what I should back up in the first place...im a noob!!!

Just get a USB thumb drive and put a LiveISO on it.  That'll give you the experience of using Linux on your machine without having to commit.

[lakes]

ive been meaning to switch but there are still programs that refuse to work on linux. BYOND (what space station 13 runs on), Autodesk AutoCAD and other stuff. its just held together with ducktape all around AND THE NVIDIA DRIVERS RAH I HATE THEM THEY DONT EVEN WORK PROPERLY

I'm not sure how good it is because I don't use Nvidia, but they are working on support for it if it makes you feel better. Linux Mint recently had a update to the nvidia drivers. There's also a Linux distro meant to solve the problem with Nvidia drivers but I forget the name. However I, unfortunately, do not have a solution for the software problem. Since all the solutions so far are imperfect for Windows-only software support.

[tarraxahum]

Funny that the first thread I see after I finally log in on the forum after blanking out due to some minor life changes, one of which WAS, in fact, switching to Linux and getting a feel for my system all over again, is this one.

AND THE NVIDIA DRIVERS RAH I HATE THEM THEY DONT EVEN WORK PROPERLY

As an NVIDIA user, I can now say they seem to be working fine. Then again, that's from my rather noob point of view and I did choose a distro catered to gamers which already had the Nvidia drivers handled (Nobara). At the very least, my Steam gaming list seems to be doing swimmingly (and so do games that I just. run through Steam anyway to make it easier :D)

The specific software struggle is real though. I'm still grappling with the fact that I'll have to re-learn using more traditional video editing software 'cause launching Capcut on this thing is a feat and a half (and so far no tutorial saved me). In retrospect, however, that may be not such a bad loss, I just need to huff about it.

Back to OP's starting post though. I've been wondering about having even more customization options (KDE Plasma is great, but I am greedy). I'll have to look into EWW eventually. Thank you!

[oldmurray34]

BYOND (what space station 13 runs on)

Holy hell, a SS13 player using an OG BYOND in a wild

But anyways I second what @tarraxahum said about NVIDIA drivers. It's mostly a problem for some esoteric distros or if you use a very wacky GPU, but overall even on Arch drivers are fixable by installing one package and a very limited amount of finagling. Overall I urge everyone to consult Arch wiki, it's seriously awesome no matter what distro you use. Probably the most useful and easy to read documentation I have ever seen

[myladon]

Holy hell, a SS13 player using an OG BYOND in a wild

But anyways I second what @tarraxahum said about NVIDIA drivers. It's mostly a problem for some esoteric distros or if you use a very wacky GPU

Hell yeah, heck. I moved back to windows just for ss13. anyhow, I use Mint and it has some really weird/"esoteric" issues like screen tearing only in the desktop, steam big picture mode lagging too much for no reason and what i also mentioned, software issues that can be hardly remedied (idk any software that reads DWG format files on linux)

another silly issue is Hotline Miami's savefiles on linux are separate from windows what the hell

As an NVIDIA user, I can now say they seem to be working fine. Then again, that's from my rather noob point of view and I did choose a distro catered to gamers which already had the Nvidia drivers handled (Nobara). At the very least, my Steam gaming list seems to be doing swimmingly (and so do games that I just. run through Steam anyway to make it easier :D)

If Nobara works for you don't have to rlly change it. wanting the easy way out isnt a noob's thing btw lmao

[myladon]

The specific software struggle is real though. I'm still grappling with the fact that I'll have to re-learn using more traditional video editing software 'cause launching Capcut on this thing is a feat and a half (and so far no tutorial saved me). In retrospect, however, that may be not such a bad loss, I just need to huff about it.

if what you using doesnt work or doesnt do what you want it to, remember! its linux, you can install other programs. I use kdenlive and it works pretty well :p good luck learning!!

[tarraxahum]

if what you using doesnt work or doesnt do what you want it to, remember! its linux, you can install other programs. I use kdenlive and it works pretty well :p good luck learning!!

Oh trust me, I'm well aware. None of Linux alternatives really replace CapCut for what it is, hence why people are still trying to jump through hoops to get it working. I just gotta contend with the fact that now to make, say, a flash transition between clips I gotta make magic with a white overlay and quick fade-in/fade-out instead of clicking a pre-made transition effect, y'know?

Thankfully I am not a social media editor who needs to pump out quick videos with trendy editing (and for that there's always mobile), and I did originally start with editors like Sony Vegas and the like, so it's not an uncharted territory per se. I'm just mourning the lazy way out in that regard

If Nobara works for you don't have to rlly change it. wanting the easy way out isnt a noob's thing btw lmao

Wasn't planning on it so far! I was just saying that if there are some serious problems with Nvidia drivers that aren't obvious from simply running Cyberpunk 2077 or some such - then I wouldn't notice them.