Turns out most people just want a functioning operating system and don’t need a 4d-chess mosaic of self-expression.

I think it's more complicated that that.

I spent a fair amount of time getting my system set up the way I like it, with colors, fonts, status bars. But once it was set up, I don't mess with it much. So doors that mean I spend a lot of time ricing, or not?

I spent far more time ricing it at the start than you'd do on Windows or Mac. But since they, almost none.

So, on the one hand, yes, we rice a lot compared to other OS users; on the other, hardly any time.

Then you get people who's hobby it is to rice, and they probably would alone drop the scale to "ricing a lot," but I don't think they're representative.

Its unfair that breeze is such a dam clean looking theme.

I try to choose a distro that looks aesthetically pleasing out of the box so I don't have to do any of that.

It was fun for a while. But now I just want a stable system.

Bro i just use KDE. Sometimes i tweak it a bit, mostly when i should be doing something else. But i think the defaults are just perfect.

I just want the option to tweak it a bit. I like the fact that if i want to open Dolphin file manager with my buttplug i can probably find a way to do so.

Libadwaita looks pretty great 🤷

I set dark mode, choose a wallpaper, change a couple of keyboard shortcuts, and I'm done.

Customizing my development setup is enough for me.

When I have discovered Linux, I did all the ricing with Compiz, until I actually had to get productive ...

Not visually, at least. But especially on bare WMs, custom scripts and hotkeys are the way to go.

@Sunshine Using stock Ubuntu without touching the look and feel since 08.04, I'm a normie ^^

I used to play with compiz fusion a long time ago. After breaking so many systems I eventually just stuck with stock.

I find it's just a lot of effort to go through visual customization for very little benefit, I have spent more time creating rootless podman images for certain apps, custom scripts, keybinds etc.

What I mean to say is there's likely many people who customize functionality of their systems one way or another — without ever touching the visual side of things much beside maybe changing the font or turning dark mode on.

I do change the background image every now and then.

Gnome with Dash to Panel and ArcMenu

Good nuf

It's amazing how much I agree with (almost) every response to this post (so far).

My UI could be prettier but it is not distractingly bad or ugly. Just changed my wallpaper and that's probably the only visual customization I'll do.

Customized bling bling PCs are for kids. Like Windows.