you know the Fast and the Furious movies? at least the original 2 or 3, those cars were all tricked out with neon lights, decals, nitros, custom exhaust, all that? most of those cars were Japanese cars that were heavily modified. Basically it was a derogetory term for modifying a piece of shit car to look good, Especally if it was a Japanese car. you slap a body kit on it, neon lights, slap in some bucket seats, switch out the exhaust, but you dont’ touch the engine. that’s a “Ricer” it’s not a good thing in that specific car culture.

So for whatever reason someone at some point was modifying their Desktop Environment or Window Manager with neon borders and all that and decided to call it a Rice. You’re essentially modifying your OS without touching the “engine” so to speak. You’re just slapping a body kit, neon lights, some bucket seats etc onto your operating system.

As I understand it, ricing a machine is to excessively modify it to achieve more speed, users of Gentoo being the origina ricers in the Linux world.

The term itself has dubious and arguably racist origins, in the world of modification of Japanese cars for street racing.

Many linux installers give you the option of using the free space in your Windows drive for a linux partition (Linux mint is one example). Then you would have what is called a dual boot setup. It means every time you start your computer, you can choose Linux or Windows.

Then you disable bitlocker in your windows partition, and you can access all the files there from linux.

If all of your partitions are in a single NTFS drive it probably wise to make a backup, if it in a separate drive you can access it in Linux (read only, if you want to write into it you need to install “ntfs-3g” package)

Contrary to other comments, it’s actually pretty common and easy to install Linux alongside Windows, if you have a harddrive big enough for both. If you want to have both installed, it is recommend to start with Windows because Linux boot loader can recognise Windows partition and integrate it with no problem. And Linux natively supports ntfs so you can seamlessly access all your files absolutely no problem. But if it’s your first time installing Linux it’s easy to mess up and kill the windows partition if you aren’t good with terminology yet, so backing up all your files is not just recommended but straight up required.

You’ll need to migrate your files somehow. Installing linux over windows generally entails reformatting, which will erase everything.

Much better to install Linux, install a virtual machine (GNOME Boxes) in which you run what you still need Windows for, and access files via a Samba service as shared files.

Or just switch to Linux, and copy your files. It is good for daily use.

Generally, no. You can’t install Linux onto a Windows filesystem (NTFS). What you can do is one of these things:

• Back up the files you care about (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, whatever) in Google Drive, Dropbox, a thumb drive or anywhere else that you can access later. Then you can tell the Linux installer to wipe Windows and afterwards put your important files back.

• If you have a spare SSD you can put Linux on that. Then you can access the Windows drive from Linux. You might have to install an NTFS driver first, and you will definitely need to configure Windows to shut down properly instead of secretly hibernating, because that leaves the filesystem in a weird state and Linux won’t be able to open it.

• If you don’t have a spare SSD you can still do the same trick by shrinking the Windows/NTFS filesystem and installing Linux in the now-free space on the same drive. Among Sysadmins shrinking filesystems has a bad reputation because at least historically it could (rarely) fail and destroy all your data, so I would not recommend you do it but it is possible and in most cases it works without issues.

Each of these comes with some risk - You might forget to copy over important files onto your thumb drive, or you might make a mistake in the Linux installer and accidentally delete Windows when you didn’t mean to. That said you should already have a backup strategy, because your PC could also just spontaneously die and lose the data even if you do nothing. If you have backups and you’ve tested them to know that you really can restore all the files you care about, then even that first option stops looking very scary.

I agree that KDE is better for newcomers. I’ll never understand why the newbie-friendly distros tend to favor GNOME.

I grabbed like 3 apps to apply themes and icons on gnome and got confused trying to pick the best option

You made your bed, and have been laying in it. A man of virtue.

That’s because the origin of the word mildly is.

there’s accent colors too now

You set a wallpaper?

I do the same but I also make sure the panel’s on the top edge of the screen

I started with gnome and a handful of plugins to make it more like how I was used to, but over the years I pretty much just use stock, because once I got used to it it is just good by itself. Except for GTile. I still like to install GTile.

My PC at the time couldn’t handle the skins in XP. I was sad.

It really didn’t like KDE. I never got on with gnome. Don’t ask me why, it was 20+ years ago!

That wallpaper comes with Plasma

Honestly, usually the only thing I HAVE to change. Idk why all the default distro wallpapers suck

Does setting it to a solid color counts?

Are you the hacker we keep reading about in the newspaper?

rookie number i know but I don’t wanna waste anymore time than I already did, gotta spend those time for DE/WM hopping :P

RICE is a post-hoc acronym (backronym) meaning Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement. Its from car communities.

It used to be a racist term referring to the modification of JDM vehicles, hence the post-hoc change to the definition. Its a word that came into common parlance without folks completely knowing it was racist.

It’s a racist term people used to refer to Japanese cars that have been “souped up”

Customizing the appearance of the desktop, for example with custom themes, widgets that show various stats etc etc

The term also confuses me. What does customising a desktop have to do with rice? Is it like beads to decorate stuff? Maybe “beading” would have a bad interpretation, but rice is just confusing.

Dock to Dash singlehandedly saves Gnome for me.

Turns it from something I couldn’t even tolerate using, into probably my favourite desktop.

What’s the blue extension?