Are you the hacker we keep reading about in the newspaper?

My PC at the time couldn’t handle the skins in XP. I was sad.

It really didn’t like KDE. I never got on with gnome. Don’t ask me why, it was 20+ years ago!

rookie number i know but I don't wanna waste anymore time than I already did, gotta spend those time for DE/WM hopping :P

Honestly, usually the only thing I HAVE to change. Idk why all the default distro wallpapers suck

That wallpaper comes with Plasma

I started with gnome and a handful of plugins to make it more like how I was used to, but over the years I pretty much just use stock, because once I got used to it it is just good by itself. Except for GTile. I still like to install GTile.

I agree that KDE is better for newcomers. I'll never understand why the newbie-friendly distros tend to favor GNOME.

Oh man, old school Compiz with the wobbly windows and a million other tricks absolutely blew my mind. Magic rainbow spark particles when I minimize a window? Yes please! Fire trail that follows the cursor? No problem!

RICE is a post-hoc acronym (backronym) meaning Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement. Its from car communities.

It used to be a racist term referring to the modification of JDM vehicles, hence the post-hoc change to the definition. Its a word that came into common parlance without folks completely knowing it was racist.

The term also confuses me. What does customising a desktop have to do with rice? Is it like beads to decorate stuff? Maybe "beading" would have a bad interpretation, but rice is just confusing.

It's a racist term people used to refer to Japanese cars that have been "souped up"

You made your bed, and have been laying in it. A man of virtue.

I grabbed like 3 apps to apply themes and icons on gnome and got confused trying to pick the best option

I remember picking nice desktop backgrounds and even downloading gigabytes thereof, sorting and categorizing them, only to notice that my windows were fullscreen all the time anyway. Now I just have a background to indicate that at least some things work because a black background would mean trouble (file missing etc.).

I'm on the verge of swapping off windows 10 to Nobara. Besides this comment do you have any points that could sway me toward Nix?

Dvorak will help up that percentage

The first time you do a presentation and forget how to add an external display, that was what made me stick with a full DE.

A lot of it seems like removing the automated easy parts to customize it to be faster only to realize you don't feel like spending time on that breaking or being so inflexible. Like I can switch to lxqt but now it doesn't even feel like I have a complete desktop and are spending time making it work instead of just using it

Many linux installers give you the option of using the free space in your Windows drive for a linux partition (Linux mint is one example). Then you would have what is called a dual boot setup. It means every time you start your computer, you can choose Linux or Windows.

Then you disable bitlocker in your windows partition, and you can access all the files there from linux.

The answers might have confused you due to the unfortunate phrasing of the question. Let me clarify:

-Linux installation requires a separate partition. This can be your D:/ drive from Windows, a completely new physical drive, or a partition you free up on any drive using the Windows Disk Management. -This partition will be wiped upon installation. Back everything up from there. -All other partitions, including drive C:/, will be fully accessible from Linux. -Your Linux partition will not be visible from Windows. There are ways to interact with it from there, but they are neither convenient nor fully functional, and you probably shouldn't rely on it.

Overall, it's always a good strategy to back up everything important before installing a new system or reinstalling old one, but you probably know this already and this is not a strict technical requirement - just a peace of mind tip.

If all of your partitions are in a single NTFS drive it probably wise to make a backup, if it in a separate drive you can access it in Linux (read only, if you want to write into it you need to install "ntfs-3g" package)

Contrary to other comments, it's actually pretty common and easy to install Linux alongside Windows, if you have a harddrive big enough for both. If you want to have both installed, it is recommend to start with Windows because Linux boot loader can recognise Windows partition and integrate it with no problem. And Linux natively supports ntfs so you can seamlessly access all your files absolutely no problem. But if it's your first time installing Linux it's easy to mess up and kill the windows partition if you aren't good with terminology yet, so backing up all your files is not just recommended but straight up required.

You'll need to migrate your files somehow. Installing linux over windows generally entails reformatting, which will erase everything.

Generally, no. You can't install Linux onto a Windows filesystem (NTFS). What you can do is one of these things:

• Back up the files you care about (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, whatever) in Google Drive, Dropbox, a thumb drive or anywhere else that you can access later. Then you can tell the Linux installer to wipe Windows and afterwards put your important files back.

• If you have a spare SSD you can put Linux on that. Then you can access the Windows drive from Linux. You might have to install an NTFS driver first, and you will definitely need to configure Windows to shut down properly instead of secretly hibernating, because that leaves the filesystem in a weird state and Linux won't be able to open it.

• If you don't have a spare SSD you can still do the same trick by shrinking the Windows/NTFS filesystem and installing Linux in the now-free space on the same drive. Among Sysadmins shrinking filesystems has a bad reputation because at least historically it could (rarely) fail and destroy all your data, so I would not recommend you do it but it is possible and in most cases it works without issues.

Each of these comes with some risk - You might forget to copy over important files onto your thumb drive, or you might make a mistake in the Linux installer and accidentally delete Windows when you didn't mean to. That said you should already have a backup strategy, because your PC could also just spontaneously die and lose the data even if you do nothing. If you have backups and you've tested them to know that you really can restore all the files you care about, then even that first option stops looking very scary.

Ownership is cool and customizing your stuff transforms it from something impersonal or commercial into something intimate, revealing, and special. I believe the world needs to rubberband a bit back away from factory made, hyper-commercialized, and unrepairable goods to the hand crafted and human creations we all long for in the utopian media we consume.