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

  • VorthasEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.

    Depending on the DE, if it’s not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.

    • Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
    • Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
    • Kitty as my terminal of choice.
    • Clementine as my music player of choice
    • yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
    • htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look
    • exa over ls
    • wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      Interesting browser choices. ;-) I like what I see from Vivaldi, but I rarely need Chrome compatibility and Chromium is in the repositories of all distributions I use, so I never opt for Vivaldi. Just a personal preference or any good reason to use Vivaldi over Chromium etc.?

      • VorthasEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        Honestly because it’s quite customizable, that’s about it. Being able to customize my software to look and work the way I want them to is a big reason why I use certain programs over others.