Linux

Every machine I care about runs Linux. The server that serves you this page, obviously. But also the desktop this post was written on. This hub collects the desktop side of that: the setups, the ricing, the small quality-of-life stuff. The server side has its own hub.

Linux on the Desktop Is Fine Now. Really.

The old jokes don’t land anymore. Hardware mostly just works, the big desktop environments are polished, and thanks to Proton even gaming went from “dual boot for that one title” to “it usually just runs”.

What Linux still asks of you is a decision. Which distro, which desktop, which of the fifty terminal emulators. That freedom is the feature. It’s also the thing that scares people away, because the first week is one long menu.

My advice: pick something boring and popular first. You can always go weirder later. Everyone does.

Ricing Without Burning a Weekend

Ricing, for the uninitiated: making your desktop look the way you want, down to the pixel. The r/unixporn screenshots everyone envies are riced Hyprland setups more often than not.

I envied them for years and never had the time to learn the config syntax. Then I threw Claude Code at the problem and riced my Hyprland setup by just describing what I wanted. Keybindings, window rules, Waybar, the lot. It’s the lazy path and I’m not sorry.

One thing that post taught me the hard way: when a documented feature refuses to work, check your versions before you lose hours. The docs may be newer than your package.

A Rice Is Only as Good as Its Wallpaper

Sounds shallow. Is true. The wallpaper sets the palette for the entire desktop, and finding good ones is harder than it should be, because the internet is drowning in watermarked stock sites and AI slop.

I keep a list of the sources that are actually worth your time, from the gold standard to the hidden gems.

And Everywhere Else

The desktop is the visible part. The same kernel runs my whole server setup, every container, every service on this domain. If that end of Linux interests you more, start with the Self-Hosting hub or go straight to Docker.

That’s the nice thing about Linux: the skills transfer. The shell you learn while ricing is the same shell that fixes your server at midnight.