What is "Ricing" on Linux?
Ricing means "customizing" your Linux operating system. Unlike Windows and macOS, Linux allows you to customize literally anything on the operating system, and the more customized the system gets, the more riced it is.
The customization of someone's system is called a "rice," by the way.
- I've started ricing my PC, but my rice doesn't look good yet
Ricing has various levels to it. Often ricing is associated with changing the look and feel of the operating system, but pragmatic ricers can rice for convenience, customizing the system to make it easier and faster to do their customary tasks.
The simplest ricing is to just change your wallpaper.
The next ricing you can do is change your theme, cursor, icons, and so on.
The next thing that you can do is customize your desktop environment or replacing it. Different DE's provide all sorts of different behavior, and they often provide all sorts of customization.
You can customize your taskbar, add "tasklets" to it, you can add "desklets" to your desktop. If you use the terminal often, you can customize the terminal colors.
Beyond that, you will want to customize your global keyboard shortcuts and start working on automating your tasks through your computer. You can set up keyboard shortcuts to open your favorite applications, or even write simple scripts in Python to perform tasks whenever you press a chord, e.g. a keyboard shortcut to switch from one wallpaper to another. It's also fairly simple to create a script that is executed every time you open the terminal by customizing your .bashrc dotfile.
The next level of ricing is writing your own daemons, desklets, and tasklets, so you can make your computer do your tasks for you and display information for you without you having to interact with anything.
Practically every type of ricing you can do on Linux you can do on Windows as well. For example, on Windows different desktop environments exist, they are just called "graphical shells" instead. The main difference between customizing the operating system on Linux and doing it on Windows is that on Windows people rarely do that themselves. They may download some software that changes part of the system for them, and that's about it, and that software turns out to be malware, that's just their fault for installing random software on their PC's. Meanwhile on Linux, ricing is part of Linux' culture and identity: the freedom to make your operating system do whatever you want and look however you want shall not be infringed. With a bit of learning and some tinkering, and a lot of free time, I believe that anyone can make a rice that makes them happy with the computer they have.
