Ricing Is a Trap (And I Still Do It)

What Is Ricing?

For those who don’t know:

Ricing is the practice of heavily customizing a system’s appearance—window manager, colors, fonts, bars, icons—primarily for aesthetics rather than function.

A major influence on ricing culture is r/unixporn , where users share highly polished setups. It sets the visual standard and often drives the cycle of tweaking, comparing, and re-tweaking.

Why I Started Ricing

This goes back a while. I was 13, using an old HP 630—i3, integrated graphics, 6 GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 720p screen. A 2011 budget laptop that I somehow used until 2024, when it finally died (it got smashed on the floor).

Back then I was on Windows 10 (yes, Windows…). I was trying to install GCC with MinGW-w64, blindly pasting commands I didn’t understand. It failed. Completely.
Then I discovered package managers.

I installed GCC with Chocolatey in minutes. That moment was eye opening.
Why download an installer just to install another installer? Why isn’t everything this simple?

I started exploring Chocolatey, liked it, then hit its limits. Tried others—same story.
That’s when I found Linux.

I decided to switch.

First problem: which distro?
After a day of overthinking, I chose Ubuntu.

Mistake #1.

I kept a backup of my Windows key—just in case. (I’d later enjoy the feeling deleting it.)
Used Ubuntu for about a week. Learned basic shell stuff. Switched from GNOME to KDE. Then got bored.

Next choice: Arch or Debian.

I picked Debian.

Mistake #2.

Didn’t last a day. Defaults annoyed me. Everything felt… off.

So finally:

Arch.

I used the install script.

Mistake #3.

Installed KDE again.

Mistake #4.

I was still chasing a “better Windows.”

Then it began.

• GRUB themes.
• Fonts.
• Icons.
• GTK themes.
• Kvantum.
• Transparency.
• Polybar.
• Neovim.
• Tmux.

Endless tweaking.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had entered the loop.

The influence of r/unixporn didn’t help either. Every setup looked better than mine. There was always something to improve.

So I kept going.

Then I wanted tiling.

Installed Bismuth on KDE.
Finally felt “complete.”

It didn’t last.

A KDE update dropped.
I ran:

sudo pacman -Syu

Everything broke.

Qt had updated.
Bismuth stopped working properly.
My setup collapsed.

I tried downgrading.
Reinstalled using old mirrors.
Nothing worked.

Time to switch!

This time: i3.

No desktop environment. Just a window manager.

At first, it felt alien.
Then it clicked.

• Picom.
• Rofi.
• Polybar.
• Alacritty.
• Pywal.

Now things made sense.
Booting into TTY → starting X manually → control.

All of this Windows -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch KDE -> Arch i3, somehow happened in less than a two month time frame.

System usage dropped:

• ~ 200MB RAM in TTY
• ~ 300MB with X

I even compared it to a 2024 MacBook.

Mine felt faster.

Opening files, navigating, launching apps—instant.
Only lost in heavy CPU/GPU tasks (but that’s fair enough).

And yeah… I never stopped ricing.

I just got faster at it.

What Did I Learn by Ricing? Yes, Ricing.

One of the biggest things ricing taught me was minimalism. I did not really notice it at first, but over time it became obvious: I preferred systems that stayed out of my way, things that had a purpose, things that did not waste my time.

I also learned the value of control. The more control I had, the better I understood my system. Once you start changing the desktop, the window manager, the theme, the bar, the fonts, the keybinds, you stop seeing Linux as some abstract thing and start seeing how the whole machine actually works.

I began to appreciate software that simply worked and did not constantly demand attention. A lot of people in the community love to argue about systemd being evil or not being “Unix philosophy” enough, but honestly, I did not care. It was invisible to me. It did not get in my way. It did its job, and that was enough. The same thing happened with resource usage: if something was light and stable, I was fine with it (this may change as I will be trying different init systems with Artix Linux).

That is also why I never really got into Gentoo. The idea sounded cool at first—compile everything yourself, squeeze out performance, build a system from scratch—but in practice the cost was too high. Manually managing dependencies and spending all that time just to say you did it was not worth it for me. Arch made more sense. It had a better community, better documentation, and most importantly, it did not annoy me. It just clicked.

The same goes for the suckless crowd and things like dwm. It looked interesting on paper: compile your window manager every time you change something, patch everything by hand, keep it ultra lean. That sounds cool until you realize you just want your desktop to function. i3 gave me that balance. It was simple, stable, and did what I needed without turning every tiny change into a project.

There is a difference between what looks impressive and what actually fits you. A lot of community culture pushes you toward what is considered “correct,” but your desktop should not be built to impress strangers. It should be built to suit your own workflow.

A person’s desktop says a lot about how they think a computer should behave. Windows and macOS do give you customization, but only inside a locked system. It was never really yours; it was their idea of how a computer should look and work. Linux is different. It let me shape the machine into something that felt like mine.

That is probably the real lesson.

Ricing is not just about making things pretty. It is about learning what one values.

For me they were: control, simplicity, stability, and systems that stay out of the way while still feeling mine.

When It Becomes a Trap

Ricing starts as curiosity, then slowly turns into a cycle. You change one thing, then another, then another, and somehow the desktop is never done.

Ricing feels like learning at first—and sure, in some sense it is. You’re exploring, breaking things, figuring stuff out. But that phase doesn’t last. It quickly turns into endless tweaking.

You stop improving your system and start feeding it.

One change leads to five more. Fix one inconsistency, notice three others. Adjust a color, now the bar looks off. Change the bar, now the fonts feel wrong. It never ends. It can’t end.

You tell yourself: this is the last change. It never is.

At some point, you cross a line without noticing. You’re no longer using your system—you’re maintaining it. Constantly adjusting, constantly refining, constantly chasing some idea of “perfect” that doesn’t actually exist.

And the worst part? It feels justified.

You call it learning. You call it customization. You call it control. But most of the time, you’re just stuck in a loop—polishing the same surface over and over again.

The scope keeps expanding. What started as “just a theme” becomes your window manager, your compositor, your fonts, your shell, your bootloader. Every layer becomes something you have to touch.

You don’t sit down to use your computer anymore.
You sit down to fix it.

And somehow, that starts to feel normal.

Where I Draw the Line (or at Least Try To)

Ricing isn’t useless. It taught me a lot. It forced me to explore, to question defaults, to try alternatives. Without it, I probably would have stayed on Windows, never caring about how anything actually worked.

So I’m not against it.

But there’s a point where it stops being exploration and starts being noise.

The problem is: even when your system is stable, fast, and does everything you need—you still feel like you’re missing out. There’s always some new tool, some new window manager, some “better” setup you haven’t tried yet.

And that feeling is dangerous.

It pushes you back into the loop.

You start breaking a perfectly working system just to chase something you don’t even need. Not because your setup is lacking, but because you think it might be.

That is where I try to draw the line.

If my system:

• Is stable
• Does what I need
• Doesn’t get in my way

Then I stop.

Or at least, I try to.

I don’t switch just because something is “cool” anymore. I don’t rebuild everything just to try a slightly different approach. I don’t chase minimalism for the sake of it, or performance for numbers that don’t matter.

The state of something being “good enough” is actually very hard to accept.

And still, I do break my own rules.

Sometimes I go back, tweak things, try something new, chase that same loop again.

Just now I’m aware of it.

I know when I’m learning—and when I’m just wasting time pretending to learn.

Conclusion

I still rice my system.

Not because it’s necessary, but because I like it.

I just try not to forget that the system is meant to be used, not endlessly rebuilt.

Ricing never really ends. You just get better at stopping yourself. :)