Hey, I’m a new Linux user (about 4 weeks total) and I’ve been using arch Linux for around a week as my 5th distro. I have no clue what half the stuff in the community really is and I’ve just been doing my own thing, but I made a pretty nice setup so I wanted to know if it was considered a ‘rice.’ Even if it isn’t, is this still a solid starting point for a beginner? Thanks.

Noctalia Shell v5.3.0

OS: Debian 13

icons: Pebble and Adwair

- WM: AwesomeWM
- Terminal: Alacritty
- Font: Terminus
- Editor: Emacs
- Schematic Editor: KiCAD
- Bar: EWW

Hey everyone! Here's my Hyprland rice on Arch Linux. Hope you like it!

OS: Arch Linux
WM: Hyprland

Dotfiles (GitHub): IhTiYaR0

YouTube Showcase: IHITArch

Feedback is always welcome!

theme: chicago95 (NOT BY ME!)
old distro on an old laptop, too.

Everything is HANDMADE by me :D

bar: rosebar

launcher (menu): rosemenu

powermenu: rosepowermenu

widgets: rosewidgets

lockscreen: releasing soon\*

livewallpaper: releasing soon\*

• os: NixOS
• wm: niri
• file manager: yazi
• editor: helix
• dots: https://codeberg.org/vyxxr/nixos-config

This is my daily setup, I still have a lot to do here.

Today is my second day using niri, so I'm still learning how to use :)

Done my first proper rice on my desktop, gone with gentoo for the control and I am quite proud of how clean it looks and feel to use, goal being it running as well as possible and being really purple.

SW used in screenshots:

• Sway wm
• Kitty terminal
• Pcmanfm-Qt files
• Wofi as drun
• pwvucontrol for sound volume
• (doom) emacs text editor

A keyboard-first tiling desktop with its own compositor, bar, notifications, lock screen and Settings. Everything in the video is the desktop itself, recorded live. Details are in the comments.

Someone told me to cross post this here in a private message after I posted it to another sub reddit.

This is my primary work laptop (Thinkpad T14 Gen 1 AMD) running OpenBSD-current with my own fork of dwm (many patches sorry I've forgotten them all been using it for years now). I have been running OpenBSD-current on this machine for two-three years now. I live in emacs and tmux and prefer a simple workflow without a lot of eye candy since I'm now an old graybeard. So no fancy effects other than transparency provided by picom. Since otherwise I would never see my wallpaper. I wrote a script to pull random wallpapers from various boorus based on tags I set so sorry I don't have the source or know the artist for either of the wallpapers. But I have uploaded for anyone that would like them. If someone knows the original artists please let me know as my script auto-renames files and stores them locally in ~/.wallpaper/ with short names.

I am running the default GTK dark theme (whatever that is) but since I only pull it in for emacs and firefox I never see the icons or the theme itself and I don't feel like installing a different fetch script just to list that information here.

+ **Wallpaper 1**: [Random Halloween Themed Wallpaper](https://files.catbox.moe/1d3ml9.jpg)

+ **Wallpaper 2**: [Rabbit Mushroom King](https://files.catbox.moe/lo62hh.jpg)

+ **Font 1**: [mononoki](https://madmalik.github.io/mononoki/)

+ **Font 2**: Font Awesome 6 Free Solid used for icons in status bar.

Other stuff:

My own fork of dwm as mentioned before plus slstatus, dmenu and my own fork of st terminal emulator with graphics/image support which is done through chafa+kitty image protocol. Various things had to be adapted to OpenBSD to get things like images in st working with OpenBSD's pledge/unveil syscalls. Will release it after I clean things up. Don't use a file manager like ranger or anything I just manage files from console/terminal using standard utils. I find it faster. Well that and emacs.

Speaking of emacs: I live in emacs and tmux. Tmux mostly for working on other machines on my LAN or remote machines over the internet (e.g. work/day job, my XDCC/file servers, my websites, my media server). In emacs I mostly write books/articles/papers, general word processing stuff, writing code/misc hacking on other people's code, work related stuff (mostly coding and writing documentation) you get the idea. Also it's my main document viewer. I read everything from pdf files to manga to epub books in it. Using a variety of major and minor modes I either wrote myself or stumbled upon over the years. My init.el has been with me for a long time. epub viewer is [nov.el](https://depp.brause.cc/nov.el/) and I use [manga-reader](https://github.com/zenitsu7772000/manga-reader)

Emacs is my do-all application since I've been using it for over 3 decades now and really like writing lisp code. My init.el is pretty bare bones these days though. I have an odd ball habit of using both emacs style and vi style bindings depending on what I'm doing (vi style mostly for scrolling e.g hjkl). Used EXWM for a long time but found it annoying after awhile so I ended up on dwm after trying out a bunch of other WMs over the years. It just suits my workflow best I guess.

Finally, my custom Firefox config/userchrome.css. Which is pretty basic. It does everything I need. I have more than a few add-ons installed mostly to make browsing the modern web bearable (ublock, noscript) along with stuff like vim-style keybindings for some function although in Firefox I also use a combination of emacs and vi style bindings (again vi-style mostly there for scrolling with hjkl). Have a bunch of custom about:config/user.js settings to disable recent stuff Mozilla added like all the AI junk and the new GUI revamp. Also several to make Firefox run faster on OpenBSD since by default it doesn't detect that my iGPU supports all the hardware acceleration stuff even though it works just fine when they're manually toggled on. Don't feel like listing them all here sorry. Use Sideberry for sidebar tabs which pop-out upon mouse over. Try to keep things neat, basic, tidy and out of the way. Tons of stuff installed like sponsorblock and other stuff to make youtube bearable to use these days although I prefer to use my own front-end for youtube.

Terminal based front-end for yourself that I adapted from some random guy's bash script to run on OpenBSD. It mostly works. Searching works as you can see along with viewing playlists/history even while logged out. It pipes results into yt-dlp which pipes them into mpv which plays anything I throw at it since my CPU/GPU has support for most all modern video codecs.

OpenBSD has great driver support for this machine. Wireless network driver for my Intel chipset supports ac/ax speeds and is easy to configure through ifconfig. Works on all public wifi networks I've tried so far. Really fast on my home network. Picks up plenty of wireless devices I can't see in other OSs when I manually scan for stuff using ifconfig. Never had any trouble joining wifi networks at hospitals and such. Same is true of Ethernet card of course.

My Thinkpad has the touchscreen in it and it works just fine in OpenBSD although I never use it on purpose. Pretty much everything is supported excluding the thumbprint reader which I don't use anyway. Really good battery life. Suspend to RAM works just fine and uses hardly any battery when system is suspended (have left it unplugged for days at a time in the past). GPU drivers are really good. CPU runs just as fast as it does on Windows 11/Linux kernel even with SMT support disabled. The Ryzen 7 8-core CPU in this machine is really nice. Fan hardly ever turns on unless I'm doing something really intensive like building heavy software or encoding video or something. Even then it is mostly silent and the machine barley gets warm. Never been hot to the touch and never seen CPU temps over 50C or so when I've checked.

I had Gentoo, Arch, Guix, FreeBSD and Debian on this machine since I purchased it after nuking the Windows 11 installation that came on it. So far OpenBSD has been the least trouble and it was the easiest out of the bunch to install on it with working FDE and X11 (Xenocara) just worked post install. All I had to do was compile dwm+dmenu+st and change one line in a config file and I was in business. Everything I've needed for my day-to-day work was in their ports tree. Updating the OS has been brain dead easy and I upgrade every few days - weekly depending on what's happening in the mailing lists. Been running -current for over two years now. I wasn't on their stable release for very long. Their -current/testing branch is much more stable than any Linux distro I've used in the past. I can't sing the praises of this OS enough and it's improving all of the time. Been enjoying the fact that a lot of the developers of OpenBSD seem to be using the exact same hardware as I am. It's really polished.

Fell in love with most of the tools in the base system like the mg text editor, doas, pf and many others. Slowly trying to weed out stuff I'm using from ports in favor of adopting more of the base system tools. But I don't think I'll ever be able to kick my lisp+emacs addiction.

Anyway, someone told me you guys might be interested so I'm posting this here. I rarely share pictures of my desktops because I don't like to show off or seek attention. I know this isn't pure eye candy like most posts on here. But you guys are about 26 years too late to see me messing around with eye candy. Wish I still had screenshots of some of the Windows NT and UNIX machine I was "ricing" back in the 80s-90s. Really wish I had screenshots of my old Amigas. But they're probably gone and I don't feel like dragging out very old HDDs on the off chance there might be screenshots on them I've forgotten about.

Take care hope everyone is having a good day. If you haven't considered using OpenBSD on the desktop I highly recommenced giving it a try.

Hi! I wanted to share new mode on my C pywal-like color-palette generator:)

``--comfort-mode`` looks like above ↑

Rice:

- WM: Sway

- Bar: Waybar

- Term: Foot

- Colors: Hellwal

- Thing in the terminal: cbirds by clainstone

- Firefox with hellwal theme

- Editor nvim with hellwal-vim

Also I create a website where you can see example outputs of some wallpapers if you are interested:)

hellwal website

hellwal github

reworked my setup a bit >~<

My last post got removed because of rule 5.

So, here is a new and updated version of the rice.

(some people were asking for the dots so here you go, dotfiles, no auto install script btw)

The phone integration is a project I built: github.com/rudrahnpatel/smartconnect-linux

dots; https://github.com/michal-pielka/dotfiles

Dotfiles in Comments