Having spent a couple of decades in the Linux world, I have always had an interest in Linux desktop environments and how they are themed. I would often come across a post on /r/unixporn that inspired me to try to customize the look and feel of my desktop environment. So I would install Xfce, LXQt or Sway and try to recreate components that I like from other users or create my own. I would end up installing different kinds of panels, plugins, docks and launchers as well as random themes, fonts and sounds. A portion of this process would be documented, initially as random shell scripts in my home directory, before graduating to Ansible playbooks – with a brief detour into Nix that I will not elaborate on. Some of the customizations would live in my home directory, but there were often system-wide modifications to /usr required. Eventually, the constant churn and randomly broken desktop components such as a panel that mysteriously vanished or a non-functional dock led me to stick with the stock configuration of whatever desktop environment I was using at the time. The major desktop environments, KDE Plasma and GNOME, are both well polished and great out of the box. The desktop experience that they have delivered over the last few years has contributed to desktop Linux being the best it has ever been, in my opinion. But the itch to customize and tweak my desktop environment in fun and interesting ways is still there. Eventually, I was introduced to the concept of bootable containers. Bootc As A Themer’s Playground⌗ The bootc project, originally developed by Red Hat but now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is a core component of the Bootable Containers Initiative. Conceptually, it allows you to define your operating system as a Containerfile: FROM quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42 RUN dnf install -y my-custom-theme my-custom-fonts my-custom-panel Once written, you can build the container locally and instruct your bootc-aware system to use the new image. sudo p...
First seen: 2025-04-20 16:24
Last seen: 2025-04-21 14:35