I got into ricing in the summer of 2021, some time after I started daily driving Linux. This page chronicles my ricing progress.
Not all of my rices are included here. When I first started ricing, I made several rices in a short time span by changing only the wallpaper and colour scheme. I have not kept records of most of these.
[2023-05-25] Latest Complete Rice
This rice is the same as the previous one, with a few adjustments. Firstly, I have chosen not to have transparent terminals, for a more consistent flat look. Secondly, since Void does not use systemd, I have instead set up the iceberg wallpaper cycle with cron. I have also altered the wallpaper script to use SunriseSunsetCalculator instead of SunTime.
[2022-06-21]
I switched to the Catppuccin colour scheme as it contains more and brighter colours than the Nord colour scheme. I prefer the bright colours, and the larger number of colours makes it easier for me to configure all my programs to use the same colour scheme.
I've kept the iceberg wallpapers from the two previous rices, as I continue to be a big fan of the design and concept. I felt that the wallpapers' colours didn't match my colour scheme as well as they could, so I used ImageGoNord to fix this. ImageGoNord does the opposite of pywal: pywal generates a colour scheme from a given image, while ImageGoNord alters an image to contain colours from a given colour scheme (it can also use colour schemes other than Nord). I think this makes more sense than using pywal, as wallpapers tend not to contain a wide enough range of colours for a usable colour scheme. I wish I'd found ImageGoNord sooner.
I adjusted my wallpaper-changing setup to line up with sunrise/sunset times changing throughout the year (originally, the wallpaper changed at fixed times). Every day, a systemd timer runs a Python script that calculates the sunrise and sunset times using the SunTime library. Another timer runs a script that changes the wallpaper based on these values.
The cover art of the album that is currently playing is displayed using a script I've written for cmus to run every time its status changes.
[2022-06-02]
This rice uses the same colour scheme and wallpapers as the previous one. The wallpaper still changes according to the time of day (the bottom right window contains the script that changes it).
I switched to xcompmgr from picom because I'd decided to make only my terminals transparent. I felt that using picom was overkill for such a simple task as I would no longer be using its extra features, and that I should use a more basic compositor.
The Haskell code in the window on the left is a LMC assembly compiler I wrote for a university project.
[2021-09-14] First Incarnation of the Riceberg
After I discovered this set of wallpapers, my next thought was that it would be cool if I could use them to indicate the time of day. I set this up with a Bash script and a systemd timer.
I figured that using pywal with these wallpapers would be sub-optimal as it would only have shades of grey and the occasional blue and yellow to work with. Instead, I made my own colour scheme by mixing colours from the wallpapers and colours from the Nord theme.
Previously, I had been changing my desktop theme (wallpaper, colour scheme, GTK theme) daily with a script and systemd timer. After I made this rice, I started using it full-time, deleting my other wallpapers and theme files.
[2021-08-21]
Early in my ricing career I created rices with the following formula: 1) choose a wallpaper; 2) obtain a colour scheme from the wallpaper with pywal; 3) use this colour scheme with oomox to generate a GTK theme. I had upwards of 20 wallpapers, each with a corresponding colour scheme and GTK theme.
Since pywal can only use colours from the wallpaper, if the wallpaper does not contain multiple contrasting colours, the colour scheme generated will be essentially monochrome, and rather pointless (which was the case for many colour schemes I made). This is one of my better colour schemes, due to the wallpaper containing many distinguishable colours.
At this point I was starting be more deliberate with balancing form and function. I had realised that site-wide transparency, which I'd previously been using, was highly impractical. I would go on to configure picom to make only a few window types, including terminals, Discord and blank Chromium tabs, transparent. The Chromium window here was made transparent specifically for the screenshot as I thought it looked better that way.
The Python program in the window on the right calculates the determinant of a 3x3 matrix. I'd written it a long time before making the rice. I put it in the screenshot because I thought it looked good with the colour scheme. It is featured in multiple rice screenshots for this reason.