Linux Distros Should Stop Obsessing Over the Desktop: The Real Value Is Underneath

A YouTube creator who has spent years making Linux content — and who has personally attempted to build a distribution — has put forward a controversial take: the vast majority of Linux distros are wasting too much energy on desktop customization, while the stuff that actually matters — the system's underpinnings — gets neglected. It's a deeply personal opinion, but it touches on a structural issue that has long existed in the Linux ecosystem.

Two Layers of a Distro: Under the Hood vs. the Desktop

The creator breaks a Linux distribution down into two broad categories. The first is what sits "under the hood" — the kernel, drivers, shell, and command-line tools that form the actual foundation of the system. The second is the desktop environment sitting on top: the graphical interface users see directly.

His central argument is that too many distros pour enormous amounts of time into the second category — desktop customization — which is, in his view, precisely where effort is least warranted. "There's no reason to spend all your time turning GNOME or KDE into some weird, flashy thing, implementing a workflow that even the desktop environment's own developers never intended to support."

Why Desktop Customization Is a "Waste"

The creator's reasoning operates on several levels. The first is about respecting upstream work. Desktop projects like GNOME and KDE have invested thousands of hours refining the user experience, visual design, and intended workflows. When a distro makes aggressive customizations, it's essentially rewriting that carefully designed workflow — and whether the result is better or worse "is subjective."

More critically, there's the matter of user behavior. He points out that no two users interact with a desktop environment in exactly the same way. "People are going to customize it to their own needs anyway."

This is especially true for long-time Linux users: they install the desktop they want, add the extensions they want, strip out what they don't need, and add what they do. Given that, it barely matters what desktop a distro ships by default or which side the panel is on. "Whatever you ship, I'm going to swap it out for what I want anyway."

The "Ricing" Culture and a Misplaced Focus

The video specifically calls out the community's "ricing" mindset — wallpapers, icon sets, panel orientation, clock widgets, weather applets, and so on. The creator views most of these as the cherry on top, not the substance.

His recommendation is straightforward: put the effort into making the system's foundation rock-solid — internal optimizations, drivers, hardware compatibility, and whether the thing can actually be installed on a user's machine. "What desktop comes preinstalled? I honestly don't care."

The term "ricing" comes from car modification culture — specifically the slang "rice burner," originally a pejorative for cars decked out with flashy aesthetics that added no performance benefit. In the Linux community, the word was borrowed to describe the practice of heavily personalizing a desktop environment's visual appearance — custom color schemes, fonts, icon sets, window manager themes, status bars, wallpapers, and even terminal color palettes. Reddit's r/unixporn is the most concentrated showcase for this culture, where users post meticulously tuned desktop screenshots (called "screenshots" or "rices") and share their configuration files (dotfiles). Ricing itself isn't inherently bad — it deepens users' understanding of Linux and has produced a distinct community culture. The creator's criticism isn't aimed at individual users who rice their own setups, but at distro developers who redirect resources that should go into system engineering toward doing these surface-level customizations on users' behalf.

What Actually Matters: Repositories, Drivers, and Release Cadence

Speaking from the perspective of someone who has personally packaged software, built repositories, created ISOs, and written custom installers, the creator emphasizes that building and maintaining a distribution is "fundamentally not about the desktop." What truly determines a distro's quality is the kernel, the software repositories and the packages within them, the release cadence (fixed release vs. rolling release), and driver support. That's where the "real work" is.

Release cadence is one of the core dimensions that distinguishes Linux distributions. The "point release" model — exemplified by Ubuntu and Fedora — ships a new version on a fixed schedule (e.g., every six months), with package versions staying stable between major releases. This suits users and enterprise environments that prioritize stability. The "rolling release" model — exemplified by Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed — continuously updates packages to their latest versions, eliminating the need for major version upgrades, though at the cost of some stability. Repository quality matters just as much: the number of packages, how promptly they're updated, packaging standards, and whether there's a community extension repository like the AUR (Arch User Repository) all directly determine whether users can get their daily work done on that distro. These foundational decisions have far deeper and more lasting consequences than whatever theme comes preinstalled.

The Paradox: If Everyone Just Focused on the Foundation, Distros Become Indistinguishable

He's also honest about the internal contradiction in his own logic. If every distro focused solely on the underlying system, they'd become nearly impossible to tell apart. He raises a pointed example: if Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, MX Linux, and Debian all shipped stock GNOME out of the box, they'd "essentially be the same distro."

That's precisely why so many distros feel compelled to customize the desktop — otherwise they risk looking "irrelevant." In other words, much of the desktop customization out there is fundamentally about branding, not about delivering real value to users. And that's the root of his frustration.

A Reminder Colored by Subjectivity

The creator doesn't shy away from acknowledging how personal this take is. He admits he doesn't want to tell others in the free and open source software community how to spend their time, and he concedes that having some ego invested in maintaining a distro is a perfectly natural human thing — some people simply want to be seen as "the maintainer of a distro," want their project to gain popularity, whether or not that popularity is genuinely needed.

But his final appeal is clear: he wants more distros to shift their attention away from the "surface paint" and back to the engineering underneath. It may not be the last word on the matter, but in an ecosystem saturated with highly homogeneous distros competing primarily on visual differentiation, it's a perspective worth sitting with.