Ricing looks fun

At first, KDE looked fine.

Then I decided I wanted a taskbar at the top and an application dock at the bottom.

This was apparently enough ambition to destabilize the entire concept of a desktop.

I installed Noctalia because it gave me more control over the shell, the launcher, the widgets, and the overall look.

It also made my window management chaotic.

So I switched to Niri.

Niri worked.

Spotify did not like that.

Under KDE, Spotify blended in well enough. Under Niri, it suddenly looked like it had arrived from another operating system and refused to acknowledge the theme around it.

That was when I realized Linux theming is not one setting.

Noctalia can look correct.

Niri can look correct.

GTK apps can look correct.

KDE and Qt apps can look correct.

Ghostty can look correct.

Then Spotify opens with a blue title bar that looks like it escaped from Windows Vista.

Apparently, every application gets a vote.

The frustrating part is that “make everything match” sounds like one task.

It is not.

It is several theme systems, application toolkits, sandbox rules, and client-side decorations pretending to be one problem.

Still, one of the most satisfying parts of the setup came from Spotify.

I built a Noctalia launcher integration that can search for songs and display their album covers directly in the results.

That worked.

The ugly title bar remained, but the useful part finally felt integrated into the desktop.

I plan to extend the same idea to more media-related content.

That is probably the best summary of Linux customization so far:

The thing I wanted to fix stayed blue.

The feature I did not originally plan to build became one of my favorite parts of the system.