What are your ‘defaults’ for your desktop Linux installations, especially when they deviate from your distros defaults? What are your reasons for this deviations?

To give you an example what I am asking for, here is my list with reasons (funnily enough, using these settings on Debian, which are AFAIK the defaults for Fedora):

  • Btrfs: I use Btrfs for transparent compression which is a game changer for my use cases and using it w/o Raid I had never trouble with corrupt data on power failures, compared to ext4.

  • ZRAM: I wrote about it somewhere else, but ZRAM transformed even my totally under-powered HP Stream 11" with 4GB Ram into a usable machine. Nowadays I don’t have swap partitions anymore and use ZRAM everywhere and it just works ™.

  • ufw: I cannot fathom why firewalls with all ports but ssh closed by default are not the default. Especially on Debian, where unconfigured services are started by default after installation, it does not make sense to me.

My next project is to slim down my Gnome desktop installation, but I guess this is quite common in the Debian community.

Before you ask: Why not Fedora? - I love Fedora, but I need something stable for work, and Fedoras recent kernels brake virtual machines for me.

Edit: Forgot to mention ufw

  • Bob@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    8 months ago

    Gnome with Wayland: I am just too used to the touchpad gestures and sleek looking apps to go back. Even windows looks and behaves janky in comparison

    Firefox: plain better than the alternatives, the scrolling is so much better under Wayland too

    The auto dark mode GNOME extention: it between dark and light mode depending on the time of day

    Rounded window corners GNOME extension: forces all 4 corners of applications to have rounded corners

    Separate /home partition, very useful for distro hopping or in case just going the nuclear option and reinstalling everything is the easiest way to deal with a breakage