Ricing Operating Systems

I like the post, but I was surprised with this use as well, I thought it was an anachronism at this point in any context. I remember it being used to refer to "rice rockets" or modded cars in the late 90s, early 2000s, but it fell out of use in any circles I'm in by then, but it must have survived in some community. It'll probably be hard to get an honest answer without doing your own research since it's been (I think reasonably) labeled as derogatory here, as those using it may not be aware/think of it as such.

Japanese cars were referred to as Rice Burners, and the term "Riced up" came up alongside for modded cars, maybe this became widespread around the start of the Fast and Furious franchise

From the 1960s racist British motorcyclists according to this: https://linguaholic.com/linguablog/ricer-car-meaning/

I hadn't heard of this until someone linked me to a thread on /g/ years back. I honestly think the crossover between desktop screenshot threads and that board is quite large, so I'm not surprised that their lingo has caught on. I really wish there was some alternative term that captured the sentiment of superfluous customization without the racial connotations.

All my windows are fullscreen except terminals.

I could not care less how popular tiling it is. What I care about is how good it is for my use case.

If tiling is useful or not really depends on your use case and your workflow. I would say that for you tiling does not make a better experience because your workflow and your needs are different. In my workflow and use case tiling is a better, and much more functional approach, compared to anything else I tried so far, including MacOS. I do not care about ricing, I use i3 with the stock i3-bar. I rarely see my wallpaper since all of my screen is occupied by programs I need to get my work done. I use rofi/fzf/ripgrep integrated in i3, Emacs and my terminal emulator. All of my configuration is tailored so I can automatize my workflow as much as possible. Tiling, in my specific case with i3, glues everything together very nicely. I tried to replicate the same thing in Gnome-shell and it was just clunky.

Anyway, the good thing is that in GNU/Linux you can choose how to shape your user experience. Tiling is just one of the ways you can do that.

I think it heavily depends on the kind of work you're doing.

I've used i3wm for the last 4 years, and it's very helpful for when you have a bunch of short-lived windows (like terminals) or you frequently switch between two different sets of windows (like docs/code, or code/web-app).