i bit the bullet and switched from windows to linux today. never used linux before. wiped my whole drive, backed up a few essential things and chose linux mint since it was widely recommended both off-site but also from posters here on /g/. so far it's been pretty conceivable to set up drivers, get games working, etc. and i'm enjoying it but i did not know that linux mint "cinnamon" was not very customizable in terms of the theme. i would always go into desktop threads on /g/ and imagined using a cool desktop but cinnamon seems pretty basic in what it can do. did i make a mistake? i spent the whole day setting it up lol should i switch to something else? or just stay on mint/cinnamon for all the other great benefits it has and functionality?
you can always install a different desktop environment, no reason to install a new os.
>>108441825>you can always install a different desktop environmentlet's be real here, there is no way to completely uninstall a DE, you'll get like a million leftover orphaned/residual files and configs
kde plasma is the best designed but the buggieststay the fuck away from gnome
>>108441831>Be me>Like a year ago>Have KDE Crashma>Decide to try XFCE (I think)>Install XFCE without deleting KDE (I might not like it)>Didn't like it>Uninstall XFCE>Login in Plasma again>Application Launcher Widget's size permanently increasedOnly way I'm trying a new DE is on a VM or on a clean install
>>108441809I'd just play with all the things that make Linux Linux and not Windows. There's a whole lot more than just the windows have a different picture for the close/maximize/minimize buttons. Things like the file system, automation with scripting and services, and the shell, these are fundamental and common across all Linux distros, not the look and feel of your UI
>>108441825i looked into this but apparently it's not recommended to install other DE's on top of cinnamon? can anyone confirm?
>>108441922retard
>>108441809>did i make a mistake?No, you just gave up before you even began. It is GNU+Linux, so there is nothing to keep you from doing whatever you want with your system.
>>108441928there is no way to make cinnamon look interesting though. it's pretty bare bones and pretty much what you see is what you get in terms of theming. just changing colors and some positioning is the extent of what cinnamon can do
>>108441933>there is no way to make cinnamon look interesting though.Well that is a lie.>pretty bare bones and what you see is what you get>just changing colors and positioninghttps://www.cinnamon-look.org/s/Cinnamon/browse/https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/extensionshttps://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=318875The spines of jellyfish . . . of course zero effort produces zero results.
>>108441809Do you even want to spend hours ricing a WM like the autists in desktop threads do? Just to have a "cool" looking system?Unless you download someone else's dotfiles for a WM, you're gonna be spending hours doing that.
>>108442077>you're gonna be spending hours doing that.Wow, imagine all the other stuff they could be doing instead.
>>108441809Why Manjaro? From what I read, it is said to be unstable distro?
>>108442169My bad I saw pic before I read the wall of text.
>>108441922>>108442077when did /g/ get all these anti-tech faggot retards? are you just baiting, or are you unironically this much of a boring normalnigger winfaggot?
>>108441906Use mending wall. It's a flatpak that prevents different DEs from bleeding into each other
>>108441809>set up driversyou haven't actually touched linux you lying faggotin the vast majority of cases, if you're not using bleeding edge hardware with an old installation image, you will never have to set up drivers at all.
>>108441906it's not recommended to sideload multiple DEs until you know what you're doing because they step on each other's settings.you can migrate but you will just get confused and give up until you know your way around a linux system
>>108442299Calm thyself, anon, Linux Mint and others of its ilk have a menu option to install Nvidia proprietary drivers just by right clicking the desktop.Right click -> System -> Nvidia driver installation. This has been the case for over a decade.
>>108441809What specifically do you want to change? You will almost certainly be able to do it, although you are correct that Cinnamon is set up with simplicity and consistency in mind initially. If you look up 'Linux Cinnamon riced' or whatever you will probably find a bunch of shit, it's just not built in to default settings.
>>108441968>https://www.cinnamon-look.org/s/Cinnamon/browse/They literally all look the sameAnd they don't even look goodYes I sorted by rating
>>108441968>https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/extensionsStacks of shit here. Even I didn't know they had so much shit and I've been using Cinnamon for years. Bulgarian radio streams applet? Yeah obviously we have that do you guys not have that???
I'm not saying do exactly this, but this is some idea of the kind of customization you can dohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJlxjcbAOA4I'm assuming you want that kind of shit? You gotta just look around man no distro has that level of customization built in by default, you are always going to have to get external packages and do a lot of fucking around if you want that gigariced look.
>>108442264>anti-tech faggot retards?You’re not really pushing the tech envelope by ricing your desktop.
>>108441809>did i make a mistake?After a few days, you'll probably switch back to Windows without posting in this thread. Wait until you get your first kernel panic / ext4 journal error. There's a reason why drug addicts don't stop taking drugs.
>>108442408better than being dumb niggercattle on windows.
How the fuck did Mint get shilled so hard when it is objectively the worst distro for noobs? Mint should only be considered if you are some destitute single display 1366x768 laptop using zigger who does nothing except browse the web. Mint defaulting to Cinnamon which is stuck on x11 is objectively bad for anyone who has a semi-modern system. Yes, you can address this, but mints defaults are BAD.No multi-display VRRNo mixed refresh rates without issuesNo HDRNo fractional scalingSTOP RECOMMENDING AND USING MINT IT IS OBJECTIVELY BAD.
>>108442573To add, Windows 8 supported VRR in 2012No X11 year old lover sessions support VRR in 2026
>>108442544This type of unearned tech-snobbery is silly. You won’t be taken seriously declaring yourself as superior just by virtue of your OS.
>>108442603you are on a tech enthusiast board unironically defending normalniggers saying "lulz why not just use wangblowz?" seriously consider suicide.
So much bait, this has to be a llm thread. Well played, ihbt.
>>108442573>No multi-display VRR>No mixed refresh rates without issues>No HDR>No fractional scaling10 years repeating these same tired lines and still no use case for any of that garbage. did you know professional photographers and artists shit on retards that use HDR? you unironically think completely fucking up your color accuracy is a feature. i lol at you retards everytime you copypaste these complete useless "features" as a reason to use an infant display manager with only the gayest of gaynigger window managers made avaliable.
>>108442818This has to be bait
>muh HDR you niggers aren't serious people.
>>108442264You are so PRO TECH because you rice your window manager to look anime as fuck, yeah. Just use KDE/Gnome/XFCE like a normal person and try doing something productive instead of making your terminal look a bit gayer than previously. Faggot
I havent used cinnamon in years but it's based on GTK3 so you should be able to change the look of apps by installing some GTK themes.Like if you want something more oldschool try mate-themes. They should work on Mint (just guessing though since I havent used mint in years)
>>108442875>no dude dont bother customizing anything or learning more about how your desktop actually works, you can just be a normalnigger like me and let other people decide all of that for you!and you have the audacity to call others a faggot. shame on you, faggot.
>>108442818>>108442847Destitute zigger relies on steam comments because he can't afford a HDR display lmaoHoly fucking lel
>>108442946nice reach and cope retard. HDR is shit and X11 is superior. go piss and cry about it.
>>108442786Yes, technology. Go program something cool on an FPGA. Write a driver for your beloved linux, fix some bugs. Engineers use Windows and get things done, what the hell do you do, rice the desktop and call yourself smart? LOL. And you know you’re inferior too, look how you lash out like a vile demon telling people to consider suicide.
Protip: If the most important thing for you is having green matrix letters and a tranime girl on your desktop, you aren't smart enough for your decision in operating system to matter worth a shit.
>>108442943>learning more about how your desktop actually worksBy ricing the fucking window? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA you know nothing.
>>108443085you are a worthless subhuman and the world can only benefit from your death.
>>108443095>no dude, you actually dont learn anything from picking your own software and creating your own personalized desktop enviornment>i just use microshart winblows instead!
>>108441809Linux Mint is deliberately "entry level" and doesn't have excessive bells and whistles you see on ricing threads by default. That said, look into Desklets and Applets, right click the desktop and taskbar respectively, and Extensions under the start menu. Do mind that most heavily-riced things are for aesthetics rather than data or performance. It's like the difference between a Mr. Universe bodybuilder and a professional boxer.
>>108441809Yes, mint is a package deal, as are all the point release distrosThey're not really meant to be modular, they're meant to be stable with specific sets of core packages and that includes your desktop environment You should switch to a rolling release distro if you want to play around with things
>>108441809Switch to Fedora KDE, just do it. Don't fall for /g/ memes like Arch. Thank me later!
>>108441809consider mint a tutorial. if you think you can do it now, install something like void or artix with no de. then you can figure out a window manager. that's what most riced desktops you see are using. easy one to do now is void with sway.
>>108441809youre hitting one of the downsides of user friendly distros, because theyre highly integrated with the DE they're easy to use ootb, but replacing them can be finicky. this is why the whole distro hopping meme exists. installing a base distro like arch, fedora server or ubuntu server and installing your DE on it will be better in the long term
If you know, then you know. ;3
lots of helpful answers here. i'll probably stick with mint for the stability and proprietary NVIDIA drivers and whatnot but i'll take a more in-depth look at some of the suggestions about customizing it.
>>108444368>about customizing it.It helps to have a picture in your mind of what you want to do, then using Google to find out how to make it happen. People have been ricing GNU+Mint Linux for 20 years. There is going to be an answer to everyone of your questions on the information superhighway.>>>/g/fglt>>>/g/sqt>>>/g/desktop
>>108444443Not him but can you make Cinnamon look like this without an unreasonable amount of effort and headaches?https://youtu.be/oTOu7VfXnl8https://youtu.be/FpWhd-UtJ2MSpecifically the ultra-minimalist windows with no title bar, and every part of the GUI looking consistent.When I (a beginner) tried ricing Cinnamon and Plasma, consistency was where I had the most trouble.Everything looked at least slightly different one way or another, and some components still retained the stock elements.How much effort is it really to make the entire OS (Cinnamon Mint) feel like a cohesive product?
>>108441809If Cinnamon is not enough and you're happy with GTK, then switch to Xfce. If that's not enough, try KDE.
>>108441809as far as customization goes, cinnamon, kde and other tiling wms are your best picks. gnome is going its own way with standardized design
>>108444786is cinnamon really my best pick? i guess i'm just not understanding how this works. when i go to sites like https://www.pling.com/s/Cinnamon/browse/, all the themes literally look the same to me with the same general "skeleton"
>>108442573>if you are some destitute single display 1366x768 laptop using zigger who does nothing except browse the webyou just described 90% of linux users
>>108441809Ignore everyone ITT reccomending Gnome, KDE or XFCE. Just switch to another window manager and forget desktop environments, they're just bloat.
>>108445137any recommendations?
>>108445162This dude is a little too dank >>108445137If you're not happy with themes, follow some tutorials on arch. You'll have to learn some but that way you can make your own "skeleton" for a de.
>>108444546Unfortunately, you will always have a gap between GTK and Qt application styles. It's a known headache. You can get around the issue by sticking to terminal UI (TUI) programs.>no title barthey're using a tiling window manager (TWM), which relies heavily on keyboard navigation instead of having window control buttons you can click on. The problem with WMs is that they don't come with any desktop utilities out of the box. It's great if you like that minimalist approach, but it's a huge time sink. If you ever want to go down that path, Hyprland is probably most beginner friendly right now, with plenty of guides and dotfiles online. Perhaps you could start with someone's premade dotfiles that come with many programs out of the box (status bar, dock, application launcher, file manager, browser etc). Spin up a virtual machine and have fun with it.
have fun lmao probably going back to windows anyways cause wine is such a pain in the ass
>>108445557it's been fine so far. got world of warcraft working and steam games. what more could you ask for really?only "issue" i'm sort of having is, since i'm using a gaming laptop with an integrated graphics card, i can't seem to figure out how the prime nvidia stuff works. i can't tell if it's even using the nvidia gpu when it's supposed to, nor can i figure out how to get certain games (like those run through lutris) to automatically launch with the nvidia. for now i've settled on forcing the nvidia gpu to be only graphics card at all times, though i think i would get a % better performance by being able to foolproof switch like i could on windows.
>>108445539Thank you.Can someone's entire setup be shared online through dotfiles, or do I still need to sink in hours even if I have all their configurations?
>>108445660It should say in their README file, but usually all you need to do is install the packages they list through your package manager and move their dotfiles over to ~/.config (and log in again). If you want a quick taste of Hyprland, you can install the Omarchy distro in a VM.
>>108445688I'll check it out, thank you.
>>108445557>going back to windowsBased.
>>108441809I mean if that's your Mint then it already looks pretty good. If you try out a new DE makes a test user (or a VM if you're extra paranoid) so it bleeds less into your existing files or just revert to an old snapshot using snapper/btrfs. If you want highly customizable you probably just want to use a tiling window manager (even if you leave it on floating mode 99% of the time)
>>108441809>cinnamon seems pretty basic in what it can doa friend of mine managed to pull an insanely unique mint setup with just cinnamon, dont have a pic at hand at the moment though
>>108446308>if that's your Mint then it already looks pretty good>screenshot says "Manjaro Linux"istg
>>108443772Follow this anons advice.
>>108441831>let's be real here, there is no way to completely uninstall a DEUse an atomic distro like a real professional
>>108445659apart from using the actual xrandr opengl and vulkan tools you could use mangohud to check if a game is running on the dGPU. check the environmental variables like DRI_PRIME. some tools like lutris set that to 1 and then it runs on iGPU
>>108444239The SPINNAN' CUBE always brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.
>>108441809Ricing is fun, but the point of a computer is to use it, right? You should get your customizations done and then go back to what you were originally doing. Don't turn into an Arch Linux user who spends hours and hours every day ricing his shitbox and then being smug online.
>>108441825>you can always install a different desktop environment, no reason to install a new os.Yes, you can. But please only use Linux Mint, if you actually want to use the Cinnamon desktop, I don't use Mint myself, but it actually has a really good integration with the Distro + Desktop. If you install Cinnamon on Debian or Fedora, if won't have full feature functionality like Mint has... I mean you can do that shit on Arch or pure Debian and DE hop... but trust me, if you run Mint, just stick with Cinnamon.
>>108447624Are there any guides out there on how to rice the shit out of Cinnamon?
>>108445067Those are just colour and icon themes. >>108447671Just look it up bro what the hell. There's already been a bunch of resources posted here. No distro has nice and easy settings to 'rice the shit out of it' out of the box, you have to find out what you actually want specifically and then find out how to do it. The entire point of ricing is that you have put a bunch of time and effort into giving yourself a custom desktop experience.
>>108447715>The entire point of ricing is that you have put a bunch of time and effort into giving yourself a custom desktop experience.Not him but the point of ricing is different for different people.To me it's not fun or remarkable. I just want an OS that works the way I need it to work and looks nice enough.If there was a distro that satisfies all the requirements out of the box then I wouldn't spend a single second thinking about ricing, but since there isn't, I have to reluctantly put in some work to get the combination I want.
>>108441831Who cares, it's not like residual files will fuck with anything. Oh no cinnamon.conf is taking up 2kb, better install gentoo!>>108441906You don't install desktop environments on top of each other, they exist alongside each other. You just pick which one you want to use on the login screen.
>>108442077you people are so boring
just use arch (don't fall into the aur rabbit hole) or fedora and use kde if you want to get into ricing your desktop
>>108442818Plenty of current era movies and games have HDR that is obviously much better than SDR as long as you don't have a poopjeet tier LCD. It's only pointless for most productivity tasks.
>>108442818I agree mint and cinnamon are both bad, but X11 does have VRR and mixed refresh rates on multiple monitors?I personally use a window manager and so do not use it, but if i plug in a laptop then the refresh rates of the two monitors are different and it works just fine, even if a window straddles the two windows.Furthermore, HDR is available on X11 I just use this toggle when I wish to use mpv with a video that has a bt2020 colour matrix.<code>#!/bin/bashmode=$1colorspace=""if [[ $mode == "on" ]]; then colorspace="BT2020_YCC"fiif [[ $mode == "off" ]]; then colorspace="BT709_YCC"fiif [[ $colorspace == "" ]]; then echo "Usage: hdr <on | off>" exit 1fixrandr --output HDMI-1 --set Colorspace $colorspace</code>fractional scaling also works fine and is actually an issue of a desktop/window manager or program. if you really want you can lie to windows and they will scale their content (if they are well made programs that respond to resize events).
>>108441809It should be pretty customizable, you can use css:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Uoe5H4ORsWhat look do you want to achieve?
>>108446357Mint might as well just be Cinnamon. 95% of Mint users use Cinnamon and 95% of Cinnamon users are on Linux Mint.
