Playing With Ricing | maurerit@github

The Cachy theme that I’ve been using has been serving me well so far but I think it’s time to explore what KDE can do. Someone in a Discord I’m in linked a ricing (a customization of the look and feel) that someone did for KDE and shared an installer for it, so I checked it out and read through the script. The script seemed fine, installs a few things, backs up some config stuff and then applies some config stuff. Seems simple enough, so I executed the installer and let it do its thing. While the script didn’t do a whole lot, all the dotfiles did… They had a fastfetch config, they applied oh-my-posh to a bash shell rc and even went as far as set my Konsole profile to open bash instead of fish and they completely changed the desktop. These configs ran deep, I should have looked through them better… not that they would have made a whole lot of sense on their own.

I decided to reboot because as part of the theme install they also themed grub so I wanted to get a view of the whole ricing. I have to say, I’m not the hugest fan of the Grub theme, I much prefer cachy’s over this one. So I get into the desktop environment and check out the view. It’s set up much like a Mac with a top bar and a dock, with the top bar holding a global menu for apps that support it. The panel setup is nice but I have 0 clue how to replicate it so I really don’t know how to fully tweak it. I’m trying, slowly but surely to make it my own but the configs are hard to pinpoint. Like, I want my top bar to stretch out and take up the whole of the top when there is a maximized window but I can’t seem to find where that setting lives. I also want it to stop being transparent as well, hmm. The setting I thought that controlled the transparency doesn’t do anything though so I don’t know how to control that.

I’m not entirely sure what I want out of my view, I just know the small aspects I like from various styles and configs that I’ve seen out of KDE. Like the default bottom panel behavior of floating until a window is too close and then it anchors to the bottom and edges. I want that out of my top bar. It currently floats and then when a window gets close it moves closer to the edge but not the sides but it doesn’t ‘anchor’ itself fully. Maybe I’ll get there with this panel, I’ve tried with a fresh panel to get it to look like my top panel, I may try again soon as I really do need to know how the author got to this state.

I haven’t been in this style of desktop since my mac days. I did run my task bar at top in windows 10 but with windows 11 they removed that option, unfortunately, so I have gotten used to the bottom panel being the only panel there is. I’m glad this new monitor has a 1200 vertical resolution as I’m now chewing up a little bit more vertical real estate when not maximizing my windows due to the dock AND top bar. Like for instance, my chat desktop, I like to see the entire shebang on that desktop so I don’t have signal or discord maximized but rather they’re setup in a way where I can easily get to one or the other without having to go down to my dock to select an app but they’re not encroaching on the docks territory. One is on the left and one is on the right (not tiled but close). I suppose I could tile that desktop and be perfectly happy but I don’t do that for some reason. My other desktops mostly have maximized apps in them so seeing a more consistent view on those desktops is where I’m trying to get. The transparency is really throwing me off.

The dock is so far exactly what I want. I like to see what I have open (little underlines on the icons) and what I have available that I usually run (the available icons on the dock), and that’s it. I rarely do much else on my computer than work with the few apps that I use daily. So my dock isn’t small but it’s not huge either. I have 16 or so apps that I use on a very frequent basis and they’re present in the dock. With my trash (may go away) and my Application Menu just in case I do want to stray away from my usual 16 so like 18 icons in total on the dock. I don’t think that’s excessive, I’ve seen people with docks as wide as their desktop. Although I do have a few terminal apps and windowed apps that I launch from the cli, so… it is what it is.

The theme I’m using is in GitHub at: https://github.com/xerolinux/xero-layan-git and it’s Arch-specific as it installs a few things like some fonts and a new widget for KDE that I didn’t have… Updatifier, I think? It’s an app that frequently refreshes the available updates and notifies me of what is out there. Right now I have 64 updates available… earlier today it was 16… then 22 and now 64, lol. Gotta love a rolling release.

Give it a play and see how you like it.