r/unixporn is a popular subreddit for sharing screenshots of your Linux rice. It also acts as a hardware and software survey, by letting everyone know your computer's specs and your workflow. If you don't want to make this information public, you can always spoof this information.
This is a screenshot of my own rice. However, the programs, the specs, the music library... they're all fake. I'll break down how you can spoof each of these components below.
Application icons
For a new application, create a file called [application_name].desktop at ~/.local/share/applications. For example, let's create a file for Firefox. Add the snippet below to firefox.desktop.
[Desktop Entry]
Icon=firefox
Name=Firefox
The Icon parameter should be a valid icon name from your icon theme. If you want a custom image as the icon, provide the path to the image instead.
Obviously, you can't launch this since there isn't an Exec parameter, but we can use this method to populate the taskbar without needing to actually install these programs.
Neofetch
This is a terminal utility to display system information about your computer. Conveniently, it also allows you to set custom output in its config file located at ~/.config/neofetch/config.conf.
To change the ASCII art, set a distro name in the ascii_distro variable. A list of valid distros are provided in the comments above the variable. For example, to set the Debian logo,
ascii_distro="debian"
To change the text regarding hardware and software information, comment out the necessary lines, and set custom output using prin commands. In my case, I set a custom title, OS, and host using the below snippet.
#info title
prin "$(color 1)kde$(color 255)@$(color 1)optiplex"
#info "OS" distro
#info "Host" model
prin "$(color 1)OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64"
prin "$(color 1)Host: OptiPlex 7080"
Music library
If you want to showcase your custom CLI music player rice, but don't want others to know your music taste, use MusicFakez. Provide an album name to generate empty songs filled with silence, complete with metadata, to make others believe you actually listen to them. This saves your bandwidth by not actually downloading the songs, just faking it.
To use the tool, make sure Python and FFmpeg are installed first. Then, run
git clone https://github.com/svhl/musicfakez
cd musicfakez
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 musicfakez.py
That's it!
Now you no longer have to pretend your Manjaro rice is Arch (btw); you can gaslight people into believing it is 🤫.
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