The good old art of ricing Linux

2024 October 12

A screenshot of my newest linux Rice

Yesterday in the afternoon, I somehow got to r/Unixporn and felt a little nostalgic. I wanted a little bit of customization for my desktop experience.

I haven't riced a Linux system in a long time. Instead of doing that I have been working on personal projects. But once in a while, I like obsessing over the aesthetics of the place I work. A little bit of beauty is good for the soul.

I decided to dedicate a single morning to it! This time around, I went with the suckless family of software. I wanted something minimal that didn't got in my way. For this, suckless is pretty much my cup of tea. They do their programs in C and you have to download and compile the software to actually run it. So I grabbed a couple of repos and started my first customization session in a long while.

Software I downloaded / customized

  1. DWM: as the window manager.
  2. slstatus: for monitoring my system.
  3. dmenu: for launching programs.
  4. alacritty: my terminal of choice.

For all the suckless programs, you only need a single command to compile, run and install:

make clean install

I ended up changing the color palette for DWM, dmenu and alacritty.

Besides that, DWM comes by default in a barebones state. You have to implement a lot of things or use patches from the community. This time around, I only installed the gaps patch and I created a bunch of little scripts for me. With the help of LLMs it was a breeze! They are super useful for short bash scripts. I created four different programs.

  1. change_layout.sh: Change between American and Latin American Layouts.
  2. notify_battery_low.sh: A cronjob that tells you when you are running low on your battery.
  3. volume.sh: For increasing or decreasing volume.
  4. brightness.sh: For increasing or decreasing brightness.

An LLM can give you so many good config defaults that it actually impressed me. I am now in the camp that thinks that you should tailor Linux for your own needs. It is so easy.

As always with customization, the sky's the limit. You can go down a super deep rabbit hole to configure everything and anything in the system. But to me, It is not worth it. I want to leverage my configs. I have a heuristic:

"the system should feel better than the default, but it shouldn't take more time to setup up than what it is saving"

If anyone tells you that linux is hard, it is because they don't know how to read. Now, with the help of LLMs it was a breeze to set up everything. I made an entire setup that is comfy in a single morning. What is stopping you from doing the same?

PS: The background is from this random image that I liked from Unsplash.


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