A Reddit community for Linux ricers and tweakers.
"A lot of the setups are too "riced-out" and unappealing for long-term desktop use."
—Reddit commentary on /r/unixporn users
"Tweakers" in the sense of "one who tweaks operating system settings", rather than someone strung out or paranoid from drug abuse. This is a different group of maniacs, addicted to making their computer desktop environments prettier and more admirable, and showing off their art form. As a group they often focus on quirky and heavily customised window manager setups, spending time blending colour schemes, themes, plugins and 'wallpaper', often seemingly to the detriment of actual usability. Many of the posted desktop screenshots are of tiling window manager setups, often highlighting the customisation of their terminal fonts, window and Vim colour themes, showing it off with such as Neofetch and other terminal programs like htop.
The quotation given above illustrates one of the problems, namely that function is often sacrificed on the altar of form. Whilst I'm a big fan of my desktop environment looking nice, what i really need is for it work well enough, then to be out of my way so i can do the stuff i want or need to do, which is mostly poking about on E2, YouTube and techy websites. sure, I do have things that exist to be eye candy, notably my Conky setup, which has a number of functions, one of which is to be pretty, but spending hours reading documentation on how to tweak themes and whatnot is not my idea of fun (though I have spent hours reading man pages for obscure commands and playing with a variety of *nix tools and refining handy scripts. I'm here to learn, not obsessively play with colour combos and terminal fonts. If I can read text and glyphs in my terminal, that's enough. My system is riced just enough to be engaging (just don't ask how many hours it took to refine my fancy Conky script =\)
i think this does illustrate one of the downsides of Linux; some people are inclined to obsess over the huge number of choices they have and become determined to push everything to the limit for Internet Points. I wish them well.
Written in part for my own pleasure, in part for passalidae, and so I don't have to write about desktop environment or window manager today. Yes, it was a successful distraction.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
370