Whoops..... First "rice" I saw I thought to myself.... Damn, that looks really nice.

  Really

N I

 C

 E

Thought I had it all figured out. FML.

It has a new meaning now. No one cares and few would bother looking up where it comes from. Languages are dynamic and change all the time. The word faggot meant a stick of wood but now it means something else and few would use it to refer to someone else. This doesn't mean we should change literature that was written before this change. tl;dr: the meaning has changed and no one cares.

I live in an obscure asian country and I rice while I eat rice.

til about this, but like, I doubt anyone uses this in a racist way though, far from it.

Sheesh, there sure are a lot of hexbear users here piling onto anybody with a different opinion

Edit: I went ahead and queried the lemmy database from a federated instance I have access to.

These are the top 3 instances commenting in this specific post at the time of writing (2023-08-25 08:02 UTC):

instance   | count
-------------+-------
hexbear.net |   205
lemmy.ml    |   106
lemm.ee     |    61

These are the top 3 instances and their comment counts on any post in lemmy.ml/c/unixporn this month at the time of writing:

domain    | count
-------------+-------
lemmy.ml    |   210
hexbear.net |   210
lemm.ee     |   100

You're reading that right, hexbear has a whopping FIVE comments in this community that are not part of this post.

For the curious, those 5 comments at the time of writing are:

• https://hexbear.net/comment/3722672
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3749006
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3722165
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3722091
• https://hexbear.net/comment/3790117

One of which is especially hilarious as we see a hexbear user that's been railing on people in this post using the very term they're condemning here. Strong convictions? Perhaps bandwagoning the hexbear teet? Who knows. Definitely not suspicious 🙄

I am disheartened but not surprised by the “obvious ethnicity based insult is not racist” comments here.

lmao like moths to a flame

@dessalines@lemmy.ml there's a lot of cryptofash in here begging the question that need to be banned, not merely have their comments removed

Kinda curious as to what actual Asian folks, whether currently in Asia or of Asian descent, think.

I don't use the term anyway because I'm an old grognard and couldn't grok the lingo, but it seems to me that they're the ones other folks should be listening to on this.

I've always thought it's something to do with how you can customize fried rice to your heart's content, and the overall versatility of rice in general.

But given that it is offensive, what is the closest alternative that gives a similar, if not the same nuance without the offense? What do we mean when we say ‘rice’/‘ricing’ in desktop environment customization anyway?

I kinda thought this conversation would eventually happen. I have mixed feelings on the subject but am generally inclined not to use the term myself as I find it distasteful. But I think there's an important consideration for those who'd like to discontinue the term rice in this community: what language would we like to use instead? Specifically a good noun for referring to a given setup we've made. In therapy they teach you that stopping a behavior is a very hard thing to accomplish, and that instead you should always try to replace a behavior- I believe that idea is very relevant here

I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on what they'd like to use instead

I don't understand where the problem arises exactly, there is no racist intent in its usage here, it's just a word, it's an empty container and we fill it with meaning. In this context it just means "customization", sure it's not a completely made up term and its origin is lowkey racist, but, as you stated yourself, not many know at all of that connotation, they go on to use it despite never meaning to use bad language on purpose, because it has simply acquired a different meaning, it was just the lingo they happened to find in the community.
There's plenty of words that had historically been bad and then became good, same the other way around. I believe that's the case here as well.

Even so, if an alternative word is proposed and favored, even just plain "customization" (which I feel would be better than replacing it with a lingo word, as it would make it easier for newcomers to understand what is being talked about more easily), I wouldn't be opposed, the main thing is to be able to convey the meaning, that's what that matters most in the end