Huh, I was under the impression it was an acronym for Racing Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement or something along the lines of that. Parts that make the car look like a racecar but don't actually help it perform any different.

It could totally be a backronym that was generated after it's initial use though.

Whoops..... First "rice" I saw I thought to myself.... Damn, that looks really nice.

  Really

N I

 C

 E

Thought I had it all figured out. FML.

Yeah, I had absolutely no idea what "ricing" was even supposed to mean, like it doesn't look like it's short for anything, doesn't seem like an acronym for anything, it's not analogous or synonymous with anything, I can't see how "rice" is supposed to be metaphorical at all to cool looking linux desktops, and it's not an entirely new word like "rizz" or "yeet"

So by all accounts it's an absolutely unfitting word for what it's describing

Knowing the racist history of the term now, yeah that makes sense and yeah I vote we move to an objectively better term

Idk what tho, maybe "decore" cuz it actually describes that the focus is the look, that the DE is the Core of the setup, and sounds cooler than "rice"

"Decore" and "Decorizing" is probably the terms I'm personally gonna use atleast

Edit: unless I find a better term, I came up with this one on the stop

It has a new meaning now. No one cares and few would bother looking up where it comes from. Languages are dynamic and change all the time. The word faggot meant a stick of wood but now it means something else and few would use it to refer to someone else. This doesn't mean we should change literature that was written before this change. tl;dr: the meaning has changed and no one cares.

I've always thought it's something to do with how you can customize fried rice to your heart's content, and the overall versatility of rice in general.

But given that it is offensive, what is the closest alternative that gives a similar, if not the same nuance without the offense? What do we mean when we say ‘rice’/‘ricing’ in desktop environment customization anyway?

Kinda curious as to what actual Asian folks, whether currently in Asia or of Asian descent, think.

I don't use the term anyway because I'm an old grognard and couldn't grok the lingo, but it seems to me that they're the ones other folks should be listening to on this.

So you are saying, all this time, we have been ricists!?

Sheesh, there sure are a lot of hexbear users here piling onto anybody with a different opinion

Edit: I went ahead and queried the lemmy database from a federated instance I have access to.

These are the top 3 instances commenting in this specific post at the time of writing (2023-08-25 08:02 UTC):

instance   | count
-------------+-------
hexbear.net |   205
lemmy.ml    |   106
lemm.ee     |    61

These are the top 3 instances and their comment counts on any post in lemmy.ml/c/unixporn this month at the time of writing:

domain    | count
-------------+-------
lemmy.ml    |   210
hexbear.net |   210
lemm.ee     |   100

You're reading that right, hexbear has a whopping FIVE comments in this community that are not part of this post.

For the curious, those 5 comments at the time of writing are:

• https://hexbear.net/comment/3722672
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3749006
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3722165
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3722091
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3790117

One of which is especially hilarious as we see a hexbear user that's been railing on people in this post using the very term they're condemning here. Strong convictions? Perhaps bandwagoning the hexbear teet? Who knows. Definitely not suspicious 🙄