I got good recommendations for desktop shells on my other posts. I looked at Noctalia and DankMaterialShell, they both are built on top of QuickShell. QuckShell is a framework for writing widgets in QML, it wasn't made until 2024. both Noctalia and DMS were made during the summer (all these dates looking at Github). They basically became popular over night.

I was looking at ricing during the spring and didn't find anything as developed or popular. I had a bunch of tabs open for AGS & Astal, but didn't find complete shells built on them. It seems like I would've had to start from scratch if I wanted an exact rice, but now I can edit pre-made QMLs instead.

This actually seems like the best time for linux ricing yet.

A dock & system tray as one bar like KDE & Windows. So far most rices I've seen have docks and system trays separate, or even don't have a dock at all. I'm wondering if there any projects that already implemented this, before I would look at doing it myself with something like AGS or ewww. I'm on Hyprland.

It's very clear that the ricing community wants to set any given colorscheme in many apps automatically, most tools do so either with wallpapers (which is inherently opinionated), or the base16 spec. The original base16 repo hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and 16 colors simply isn't enough to make rich granular themes, especially when code has many different syntax elements. We need a successor that allows for more colors on both TUIs and GUIs, more than 16 colors (like 24 or even 32), mapped more granularly.

My story:

I've spent lots of time looking at how to have good colorschemes in apps that change dynamically, to make my desktop pretty and with variety. Many tools can apply colorschemes to apps using image / wallpaper colors like Matugen and Pywal. These tools are very well made, but I realized I actually prefer rainbow colorschemes like Catppuccin. Either way I got attached Matugen, fortunately it can be used without wallpapers and supports custom keywords, there are also base16 colorscheme managers like flavours and tinty.

But Cattppuccin's base16 theme didn't look right compared to its Neovim plugin. The plugin is very well integrated and colors a lot things for you that base16 plugins may not, I would have to set certain UI colors myself if I wanted them to match. Some of the major colors (variables, keywords, brackets, etc.) were shuffled around, so out of the box Catppuccin's base16 theme doesn't even match Cattppuccin's original vision / color harmony. All of this probably applies to other colorschemes as well. So if I want to switch between different schemes while staying true to each one, I would need to set up plugins for each app rather than automatically.

I want to sort of recreate macOS 15's dynamic wallpaper, and downloaded this set of 8 wallpapers which are most / all the colors it cycles through. On Hyprland, I want to cycle through them throughout the day, but also slowly transition from one wallpaper to another for an hour or longer, crossfading / blending them.

I did some searching, and neither timewall or adi1090x/dynamic-wallpaper can do it. I looked at making my own script to blend images once every 60 secs, but I'm not sure how to quickly crossfade images. This command takes ~15 secs, I feel this should possible much faster with or without imagemagick: magick composite -blend 50 wallpaper1.png wallpaper2.png output.png.

I was annoyed by my default terminal bell sound and that got me thinking!

• OS: Debian 13

• WM: WindowMaker

• Dockapps: wmamixer, wmusic, wmweather, wmtop, wmmon (displaying memory and swap), wmmon (displaying cpu), wmnd, wmitime

• Other apps: audacious, feh, urxvt

• Git: https://git.x1b.dev/waterjones/WindowMaker-Themes

Always loved the look of WindowMaker and I always wanted to make themes for it. Also, it's my first time making themes for WindowMaker so any criticism is appreciated. Feel free to check out the git repo for more themes.

I want a display manager that shows the desktop as the background, instead of a background image or video. I'm thinking of auto-logging in on boot, and adding another startup command to Hyprland to lock the desktop and show the display manger. My searches didn't yield anything. The closest I could find is hyprlock which blurs the desktop, but that's just a lock screen & not a proper display manager.

WM: Niri

Terminal: doom emacs

email: doom emacs

file manager: doom emacs

ide: doom emacs

panel: waybar

so I was playing around with Doom Emacs today and I realized "why am I still using a terminal emulator?" with some tweeks I'm able to get pretty much everything other than gaming and web browsing running through doom. I use Aerc for email, Dirvish for file management, vterm for my terminal, all within doom emacs. I don't have a terminal installed anymore.

First time using niri and, so far, I’m loving it! I’m not used at all to post things online but, what you guys think?

You can find my dotfiles here. I have recently moved from github to codeberg so please don't care about the visual artifact on the notification.

• OS: Void Linux
• Window Manager: niri
• Bar: Waybar
• Font: Sarasa
• Color Scheme: Gruvbox
• Cursor: Capitaine Cursors (Gruvbox variant)
• Terminal: Alacritty
• Shell: fish
• Editor: Helix
• File Manager: Broot

Edit 1: Fix typos

This is actually my first rice, since I've been using Gnome + PaperWM for quite a long time and was satisfied with it. Gnome just works but... it's not fun, right? So I'm trying out ricing by my own.

How do you think?

Artix Linux, runit.

I hope I can inspire some people. I got inspired by "Debian-Z" on GitHub.

• Window Manager: i3 (Cinnamon as failsafe)
• Polybar
• Picom (compositor for blur and stuff)
• Terminal: Ghostty
• Music Player: MPD + RMPC
• File Managers: Yazi + Double Commander
• Rofi (Launcher + Bookmark Menu)
• Bookmark backend: Buku + custom bash script

The git repo with the dotfiles can be found here.

Details:

• Operating system: Arch linux
• Desktop environment: LXQt with Kvantum theming
• Wayland compositor: Labwc
• X11 window manager: Openbox
• Color scheme: Everforest
• Display manager: SDDM
• Terminal: Foot (wayland only)
• Shell: Zsh with the starship prompt
• Text editor: Helix, AstroNvim and VSCodium
• Screen locker: Swaylock
• Document reader: Zathura

My first try at ricing LM.

• Linux Mint 22.2
• I3WM + Picom
• Ghostty

Displayed on screen:

• Rmpc + mpd
• nvim
• fastfetch
• yazi
• polybar

Just wrapped up my Niri setup on Arch Linux! Includes an easy install script, dotfiles, live wallpapers, and full theming. Transform your desktop.

Never was a ricer — this was my first try without any prior experience in manually ricing so I kept it pretty simple using an existing KDE store theme.

• OS: Arch Linux
• DE: KDE Plasma
• Theme: Ant-Dracula with Kvantum
• Adjusted the panels and the widgets here and there and done.

• OS: Arch Linux

• DE: Xfce 4.20
• WM: Xfwm4 (X11)
• Panel: xfce4-panel

• Colorscheme: Gruvbox
• Icons: Gruvbox-Plus-Dark
• Font: JetBrainsMono Nerd
• Wallpaper: Tetris Gruvbox

• Other apps: Firefox, Spotify, xfce4-terminal, htop, pipes.sh, fastfetch, cmatrix, cava.
• Lots of inspo taken from this post

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/3434849

I’m not very used to ricing, so here goes nothing—hopefully without doxxing myself too much.

The icons are Material Black, specifically the MB-Pistachio-Suru-GLOW version. The theme is Osaka-Dark-Solarized.

The terminal uses the default Solarized Dark theme and is slightly transparent

The wallpaper is from the wallpapers Lemmy community.

At first, I only wanted to show the neofetch command, since this setup isn’t perfect. Some icons are missing, and I don’t know how to further customize the file explorer, but that felt like cheating.

Hopefully, this looks alright-ich.

OC by @Lain@lemmy.ml

I don't like the close and minimize buttons... So I deleted it. :)

OC by @ColdWater@lemmy.ca

Wallpaper: https://w.wallhaven.cc/full/7p/wallhaven-7p83x9.jpg
Icons: https://www.pling.com/p/1964004
Window border: https://github.com/matinlotfali/KDE-Rounded-Corners
Panel: Plasma panel + Panel Colorizer widget

still work in progress

Dotfiles (incl. wallpaper)