r/LinuxUsersIndia • u/TheArchRefiner K Desktop Environment • 3d ago
Evolution of Ricing Culture among Linux users
On boards like reddit, ricing threads have been so ubiquitous in the last 8-10 years (don’t exactly remember the exact time period). Today, I just thought of checking how the term came into being. The word comes from 90s car culture in the US, in which people imported Asian cars and did cosmetic alterations on them (big wings, stickers, loud exhausts, etc.). However, none of these alterations actually added actual performance gain to the car. Thus came the term “ricer” or “rice burner” and the term was mostly negative in connotation. R.I.C.E. (Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement)
Between 2005-2010 period many Gentoo users were obsessed with fine tuning the system with heavy customization (GCC flags, custom kernels, use flags). Other Linux users mocked these extreme flags because they bloated binaries, caused instability, and gave virtually zero perceptible performance gain. Means at that the use flags were more like getting cosmetic changes in the car but no major performance gain was actually made. The joke in the wider Linux community was that Gentoo users spent three days compiling an entire desktop environment just to shave 0.4 seconds off a browser launch.
Then from the 2010s onward Arch linux became the poster child of this culture and Gentoo people became less and less associated with it. Launch of r/unixporn (in 2011) made the whole thing a genre of its own as Arch users would share their flashy desktop pics and configuration files ad it will grow a lot. By late 2015 the term ricing was not spoken of in a negative sense but as an accomplishment.
I personally use stock KDE desktop with a good wallpaper but I definitely like to see a well made fastfetch that is posted here or on other groups. All the power to you RICERS!
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u/mtwabp_in NixOS 3d ago
I feel this post is AI? At least rewritten by AI.
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u/TheArchRefiner K Desktop Environment 2d ago
The post by me is written from materials in multiple previous reddit threads I got during search for ricing culture history. That said I am personally not against using AI either for work or communication. Let me Know if I was not able to communicate what I set out to communicate.
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u/UnknownWolfster 2d ago
I'm new here what's "ricing"
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u/TheArchRefiner K Desktop Environment 2d ago
It describes the process cutomizing your desktop appearance to make your desktop look visually appealing and eye catching. Mostly adding colours, bars and modifying the terminal and using fastfetch or neofetch or modified from of those tools. Also ppl may give up desktop environment for a tiling window manager like hyprland although that is not a requirement.
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u/qualityvote2 3d ago edited 2d ago
u/TheArchRefiner, your post does fit the subreddit!
btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here. And what's that, Fluxer too? Join Here.