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.
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?
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).
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’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.
Comes from car enthusiansts customizing their “rice burners” aka Japanese import cars. Think The Fast and The Furious.
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
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
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?
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!
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.
The way I understand it, it’s specifically not to gain more speed, but completely focused on aesthetics. Themes, background, and other touches to make it look pretty, and perhaps some UX aspects too.
I thought ricing was when asian street food vendors would make their small food carts all fancy looking?
I thought that it came from people buying cars from Japan and then modifying them both for more horsepower and to look cool?
That’s my understanding. Racist shit. Back when I was super into classic cars and muscle/pony shit, I had a friend say “I don’t know about you, but I like my cars to run on gas, not rice.”
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
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
And autohide!
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
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.
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 it in 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
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
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!
I agree that KDE is better for newcomers. I’ll never understand why the newbie-friendly distros tend to favor GNOME.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
