Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!!
Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only featuring open-source software in this series.
If you spend all day embroiled in political in-fighting, battling red tape nonsense, coding an innovative program in Python, sit in countless meetings wishing you were relaxing on a Caribbean island, you’ll need some light relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more fun.
doge is a simple motd (message of the day) script based on the slightly stupid but very funny doge meme. The contents of /etc/motd are displayed by login after a successful login but just before it executes the login shell.
Installation
We installed doge using Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, as well as Ubuntu 25.04.
For Manjaro, there’s a package in the Official Repositories which can be installed with Pamac (Manjaro’s GUI package manager), the command-line pacman, or with a helper program such as yay.
In Operation
So what does doge do? It prints random grammatically incorrect statements that are sometimes based on things from your computer.
Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme typically consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English.
- Randomly placed and colored random strings, complete with broken English.
- Awesome Shibe in the terminal.
- Fetching of system data, such as hostname, running processes, current user and $EDITOR
- If you have lolcat, you can do this gem: while true; do doge | lolcat -a -d 100 -s 100 -p 1; done
stdin support: ls /usr/bin | doge will doge-print some of the executables found in /usr/bin. wow. There are also multiple command line switches that control filtering and statistical frequency of words.
Here’s another example using the --shibe option.
Summary
Brighten up your login with doge. It’s candy personified and a perfect fit for our Linux Candy series.
Here’s all the options available:
Website: github.com/Olivia5k/doge
Support:
Developer: Olivia Thiderman
License: MIT License
doge is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Linux Candy | |
|---|---|
| ASCIIQuarium | Embrace marine life from the terminal with beautiful ASCII art |
| ASCII Art Converter | A small utility that converts images into ASCII art |
| BobRossQuotes | Collection of quotes from Bob Ross |
| Boxes | Command line ASCII boxes |
| Buoh | Online strips comics reader |
| cacafire | Color ASCII fire |
| catclock | xclock with an enhanced cat mode |
| cbonsai | Generate bonsai trees in the terminal |
| christmasfetch | Festive cheer on the desktop |
| chucknorris | Chuck Norris jokes in your terminal |
| Clairvoyant | Like a magic 8-ball inspired fortune teller |
| cornyjokes | Corny jokes for the terminal |
| CMatrix | ncurses program that simulates the display from “The Matrix” |
| ctree | A Christmas tree right on your terminal |
| doge | Simple motd script |
| eDEX-UI | Sci-fi computer terminal emulator and system monitor |
| emoj | Simple tool that to find suitable emojis for pasting to your clipboard |
| Emote | Modern popup emoji picker |
| Evolvotron | Interactive generative art |
| Fantascene | Dynamic wallpaper changer |
| Fondo | Find beautiful wallpapers from Unsplash |
| gti | Typo-based curio inspired by Steam Locomotive |
| Hollywood | Fill your console with Hollywood melodrama technobabble |
| lifecycler | Aquarium right in your terminal |
| linuxwave | Generate music from the entropy of Linux |
| lolcat | Rainbows and unicorns |
| Meme | Fun tool to create memes |
| No More Secrets | Recreates the data decryption effect from the Sneakers movie |
| nook | Plays Animal Crossing hourly themes on the hour |
| nyancat | Terminal-based Pop Tart Cat Animation |
| oneko | Animal chasing fun |
| pipes.sh | Animated pipes terminal screensaver |
| ponysay | cowsay reimplemention for ponies |
| projectM | Music visualizer originally based on Milkdrop |
| pscircle | A different take on the venerable ps command |
| PyBonsai | Generates procedural ASCII art trees |
| pyjokes | One line jokes for programmers |
| Pywal | Generate color schemes on the fly (not actively developed) |
| Relaxator | Relax to soothing sounds |
| Rusty Aquarium | Monitoring by visualization |
| Steam Locomotive | C program written in 295 lines. It's harmless fun |
| Ternimal | Animated lifeform in the terminal |
| terminal-parrot | Party parrot time |
| tetris | Tile-matching puzzle video game in your terminal |
| Variety | Wallpaper manager with many desktops and wallpaper sources |
| WallGen | Generate HQ poly wallpapers with a few arguments. |
| WallpaperDownloader | Download, change, and manage wallpapers |
| wallust | Create 16 color palettes |
| xcowsay | Displays a cow on your desktop with message |
| XDecorations | Add some festive cheer to your desktop |
| XScreenSaver | Framework and collection of screensavers |
| yosay | Like cowsay but with less cow |