Rice Your Desktop
The rabbit hole. Make your desktop look like a nuclear reactor control panel.
What Is Ricing?
"Ricing" is the art of customizing your Linux desktop to look and behave exactly how you want it. The term comes from the car modding community ("Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements") and was adopted by the Linux community for the same idea — making something look cool, sometimes at the expense of practicality.
Ricing goes far beyond changing your wallpaper or adjusting the taskbar color. It means replacing your entire desktop environment with a tiling window manager, configuring custom status bars, building widgets, writing scripts, and spending an unreasonable number of hours getting your terminal transparency just right.
PewDiePie described his rice as looking like a "nuclear reactor control dashboard." That's the aesthetic — dense, information-rich, cyberpunk, deeply personalized. His setup: Hyprland as the window manager, Waybar for the status bar, EWW for widgets, Rofi as the application launcher, and a custom daemon that auto-hides the taskbar.
This is the deepest rabbit hole on this site. You have been warned.
The Foundation: Tiling Window Managers
A traditional desktop environment (Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE) gives you floating windows that you drag around and resize manually. A tiling window manager automatically arranges your windows to fill the entire screen with no overlapping. Open a terminal and it fills the screen. Open a second window and both get half the screen. Open a third and they split again.
This sounds restrictive, but it's actually incredibly efficient once you get used to it. Every pixel of your screen is used. You navigate between windows with keyboard shortcuts. No mouse needed for window management. Power users find they can never go back to floating windows.
Choose Your Window Manager
There are two major protocols for window managers on Linux: X11 (old) and Wayland (new). Wayland is the future.
Hyprland (Wayland) — PewDiePie's Choice
Hyprland is a dynamic tiling window manager for Wayland with smooth animations, rounded corners,
and blur effects. It's what PewDiePie uses. The configuration is done through a single text file
(~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf) where you define keybindings, window rules, monitor
settings, and animations.
Hyprland is relatively new but has exploded in popularity because it looks gorgeous while being highly functional. It's the window manager most responsible for making ricing mainstream.
i3 (X11) — The Classic
i3 is the most established tiling window manager. It's rock-solid, well-documented, and the easiest to learn. If you're brand new to tiling WMs, i3 is a safe starting point. Configuration is a simple text file. Hundreds of tutorials exist.
Sway (Wayland) — i3 for Wayland
Sway is a drop-in replacement for i3 that runs on Wayland instead of X11. If you like i3's philosophy but want Wayland benefits (better HiDPI, smoother rendering, better security), Sway is the answer. Most i3 configs work in Sway with minimal changes.
dwm (X11) — The Minimalist
dwm is configured by editing C source code and recompiling. Yes, really. It's under 2000 lines of code. You add features by applying patches (diffs). It's the most minimalist option and appeals to people who want absolute control. Not for beginners.
Install Hyprland
On Arch Linux (PewDiePie's laptop distro): sudo pacman -S hyprland
On other distros, check the Hyprland wiki (wiki.hyprland.org) for installation instructions. Some distros require building from source or using third-party repositories.
After installing, log out of your current desktop environment and at the login screen, select "Hyprland" as your session. When you log in, you'll see... a blank screen with your wallpaper. Don't panic. Press Super + Q (or whatever the default terminal keybinding is) to open a terminal. From here, everything is configured through text files and keybindings.
The first hour with a tiling WM is disorienting. The second hour, things start to click. By the end of the first day, you'll be faster than you ever were with floating windows.
The Layers of a Rice
Status Bar: Waybar or Polybar
The status bar is the strip at the top (or bottom) of your screen that shows system information: time, battery, CPU usage, workspace indicators, network status, and whatever else you want.
Waybar (PewDiePie's choice) is a Wayland-native status bar that's highly customizable. You configure it with JSON (what to show) and CSS (how it looks). You can add custom modules that run scripts and display their output. PewDiePie's Waybar shows system stats, workspaces, and custom information modules.
Polybar is the X11 equivalent. If you're using i3, Polybar is the standard choice. Similar concept: configuration files define modules, each module shows information.
The status bar is where a lot of the "nuclear reactor" aesthetic comes from — dense information presented in monospace fonts with color-coded indicators.
Application Launcher: Rofi or Wofi
Instead of a start menu, tiling WM users use launchers — overlay search bars that let you type the name of an application and launch it. Press a keybinding, type "fire," hit enter, and Firefox launches.
Rofi (PewDiePie's choice) is the most popular and most themeable. It can also serve as a window switcher, SSH client selector, clipboard manager, and power menu. Rofi themes are written in a CSS-like language, and the community has produced hundreds of themes.
Wofi is a simpler Wayland-native alternative. Less customizable, but it works well and requires minimal configuration.
Widgets: EWW
EWW (Elkowar's Wacky Widgets) is a widget system that lets you build custom overlays and panels for your desktop. Think: a music player widget, a system monitor dashboard, a calendar overlay, a notification center — anything you can imagine.
EWW widgets are defined in a custom markup language (Yuck) and styled with CSS. PewDiePie uses EWW for custom widgets on his desktop. It's powerful but has a learning curve — you'll be writing scripts and markup to create each widget.
Alternative: AGS (Aylur's GTK Shell) lets you build widgets in JavaScript/TypeScript. Some people find this more approachable than EWW's custom language.
Terminal and Shell
Your terminal emulator is where you'll spend a lot of time. Popular choices:
- Kitty — GPU-accelerated, supports images, ligatures, and splits. Highly configurable.
- Alacritty — GPU-accelerated, minimal, fast. Config in TOML. No tabs or splits (use a multiplexer).
- WezTerm — GPU-accelerated, configurable in Lua, supports tabs, splits, and multiplexing built in.
- Foot — Wayland-native, very lightweight and fast. Good default for Hyprland.
Your shell is what runs inside the terminal. Zsh with Oh My Zsh or Starship prompt is the most common setup. Fish is an alternative that's user-friendly out of the box with autosuggestions and syntax highlighting.
A properly riced terminal usually includes: a custom color scheme (Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, Nord are popular), a Nerd Font (font with built-in icons), and tools like neofetch (displays system info in ASCII art) or fastfetch (faster alternative).
Dotfiles Management
All of your rice lives in configuration files ("dotfiles" — because they're in directories that
start with a dot, like ~/.config/). Managing these files is essential because:
- You'll want to back up your configuration
- You'll want to restore it if you reinstall
- You'll want to share it (r/unixporn is the subreddit for showing off rices)
- You'll want version history as you tweak things
The standard approach: create a Git repository for your dotfiles. Use a tool like GNU Stow to symlink them from the repo to their expected locations. When you change something, commit it. When you reinstall, clone the repo and run Stow.
Alternative: a bare Git repo (git init --bare ~/.dotfiles) with a custom alias. This
is more manual but doesn't require any extra tools.
PewDiePie's Rice
For reference, here's PewDiePie's setup as shown in his videos:
- Window Manager: Hyprland
- Status Bar: Waybar
- Widgets: EWW
- Launcher: Rofi
- Custom feature: A daemon that auto-hides the taskbar when windows are open, showing it only on empty workspaces
- Aesthetic: "Nuclear reactor control dashboard" — dark theme, dense information, monospace fonts, color-coded indicators
He spent significant time building this setup. It's not something you throw together in an afternoon. But that's part of the appeal — your desktop becomes something you've crafted, not something a corporation handed you.
Where to Find Inspiration
- r/unixporn — The main subreddit for desktop rices. People post screenshots and share their dotfiles. This is where you'll get ideas and steal configurations.
- Hyprland Wiki (wiki.hyprland.org) — Comprehensive documentation for Hyprland configuration.
- ArchWiki — The best documentation in the Linux world. Entries for every tool mentioned here.
- GitHub dotfiles repos — Search "dotfiles hyprland" or "dotfiles rice" for complete configurations you can study and adapt.
Honest Downsides
- This is an infinite time sink. Ricing never ends. You'll tweak one thing, which requires adjusting another thing, which reveals a bug in a third thing, and suddenly it's 4 AM and you've been adjusting terminal padding for two hours. PewDiePie himself acknowledges spending way too much time on his rice. If you have addictive tendencies toward tinkering, be warned.
- Things break with updates. Hyprland is under active development and breaking changes happen. A system update might change how a config option works, break a plugin, or require you to rewrite part of your setup. This is less of an issue with mature tools like i3 but very real with Hyprland and EWW.
- The learning curve is steep. Tiling window managers require keyboard-driven navigation. You need to memorize keybindings, learn configuration file syntax, and understand how Wayland/X11 works. The first few days feel like learning to type again. It gets better, but the initial investment is significant.
- Screen sharing can be problematic. Wayland screen sharing is still maturing. Some video call apps (Zoom, Teams) may not handle Wayland screen sharing well. Hyprland supports the xdg-desktop-portal protocol, but you may need extra configuration. This is a real issue if you do video calls for work.
- Some apps don't play well with tiling. Dialog boxes, pop-ups, floating windows from certain apps (looking at you, GIMP) can behave strangely in tiling WMs. You'll need to write window rules to handle specific apps. Most WMs support floating windows as an override, but it requires per-app configuration.
- You become insufferable. Once you rice your desktop, you'll want to show everyone. You'll look at other people's Windows or macOS desktops with pity. You'll judge people by their terminal font choices. You'll say things like "I use Arch, by the way" unironically. There is no cure for this. Welcome to the community.