Setup#

Ricing needs a Linux desktop you are free to break, rebuild, and break again. This page gets you to that starting line. Pick the path that matches the machine you already own, install the short list of tools at the bottom, and you are ready for week one. When you have a working desktop, move on to setting up your dotfiles repository, which is where the rest of the course lives.

One rule before you start: whatever you do, keep your real work somewhere it cannot be lost. Back up anything you care about before you repartition a disk or install an operating system, and never learn this lesson the hard way in week eleven.

If you already run Linux#

You are done with the hard part. Any reasonably current distribution will rice beautifully, so do not switch distros for its own sake; the desktop you build sits on top of the distribution, not inside it. Arch and its derivatives are popular in this crowd because their wikis are excellent and their packages are current, but Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu all reach exactly the same place. Use what you know.

Confirm you can install packages, that you have a working internet connection, and that you are comfortable editing text files and running commands. That is the whole prerequisite. If you are on a full desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE, you can keep it installed and log into a separate session for your rice, so you always have a working desktop to fall back to.

If you have a spare machine or want to dual boot#

Running Linux on real hardware gives you the best performance and the fewest surprises with graphics and compositing, which matters once you start layering effects. If you have an old laptop or a second drive, install Linux on the metal. Download a current image, write it to a USB stick with a tool such as Ventoy, Rufus, or the GNOME Disks writer, and follow the distribution’s installer.

Dual booting alongside Windows or macOS is possible and well documented, but it carries real risk to the operating system already on the disk. Only take this route if you are confident with partitioning, and only after your backup is done. If any of that sentence made you nervous, use a virtual machine instead.

If you are on Windows or macOS: use a virtual machine#

A virtual machine runs a whole Linux system in a window on the computer you already have. Nothing on your host is touched, you can throw the machine away and start over in minutes, and snapshots let you save a known-good state before you try something reckless. For this course it is the safest and most forgiving option, and it is the one to pick if you are unsure.

Choose a hypervisor for your host:

• Windows. VirtualBox is free and more than enough. VMware Workstation Player is a capable alternative. Enable virtualisation in your firmware first if the installer complains, and turn on the guest’s 3D acceleration so the compositor has something to work with.
• macOS on Apple Silicon (M1 and later). UTM is free and built for this hardware; Parallels Desktop is the paid, polished option. Install an ARM build of your chosen distribution, since Intel images will not boot here.
• macOS on Intel. VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, or UTM all work with the ordinary 64-bit images.

Then build the guest:

1. Download a current Linux image, matching your architecture, from the distribution’s website.
2. Create a new virtual machine and point it at that image. Give it at least 4 GB of memory and 2 CPU cores if you can spare them, more if your host is comfortable; a rice with live effects appreciates the headroom.
3. Allocate 30 GB or more of disk. Fonts, packages, and a few experiments add up.
4. Turn on 3D acceleration in the machine’s display settings before first boot.
5. Install the distribution, then install the guest additions or SPICE tools for your hypervisor so that resolution, shared clipboard, and smooth graphics work.
6. Take a snapshot the moment you have a clean, updated system. That snapshot is the bare machine your final rice must rebuild from, so treat it as the ground truth.

A note on the Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL is excellent for command-line work, but it is a poor fit for ricing a full graphical desktop, so reach for a real virtual machine instead.

What to install once you have Linux#

Whichever path you took, these are the pieces every rice is built from. Install them through your distribution’s package manager; the package names vary slightly between distros, so check your distribution’s documentation for the exact names.

• git, for version control and for cloning the configurations you will learn from. You will need it immediately for your dotfiles repository.
• A terminal emulator you enjoy looking at, such as kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, or foot, since you will spend the term staring at it.
• A window manager or compositor to rice. Tiling managers such as Hyprland, Sway, i3, or bspwm are the usual starting points, but the choice is yours and we cover it properly in the early weeks.
• A status bar and a launcher, for example Waybar or Polybar with Rofi or Wofi, so the desktop has somewhere to show information and something to launch from.
• Fonts, including a Nerd Font patched with icons, so bars and prompts can render their glyphs.

You do not need to decide on any of these today. Install git now, get your environment booting, and bring the rest of the questions to week one.