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

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    I don’t think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It’s an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.

    OpenSuse has this by default, but I’m back to good ol’ Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.

  • sntx@lemm.ee
    2·
    8 months ago
    • NixOS
      • disko + nixos-anywhere (automatic partitioning & remote installation of new systems)
      • stylix (system-wide theming)
      • agenix (secret management)
      • impermanence (managing persistent data)
      • nixos containers for sandboxing applications & services (using systemd-nspawn)
    • TMPFS as /
    • LUKS
      • BTRFS as /nix (might try bcachefs)
      • SWAP partition (= RAM size, to susbend to disk)
    • Greetd with TUIgreet (DM)
    • SwayFX (WM)
    • Kitty & foot (term)
    • Nushell (shell)
    • Helix (editor)
    • Firefox (browser)
    • slackhq/nebula (c.f. self-hosted tailscale, connecting my systems beyond double NATs)

    EDIT1: fix “DE” -> “DM”

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
    1·
    8 months ago

    Nobara KDE user here. One of the reasons why I chose it is because it comes with many of the customisations that I’d normally do (such as using an optimized kernel). But in addition, I use:

    • Opal instead of LUKS
    • KDE configured with a more GNOME/macOS like layout (top panel+side dock)
    • GDM instead of SDDM, for fingerprint login
    • Fingerprint authentication for sudo
    • TLP instead of power-profiles-daemon for better power saving (AMD P-State EPP control, charging thresholds etc)
    • Yakuake terminal (and Kitty for ad-hoc stuff)
    • fish shell instead of bash
    • mosh instead of ssh
    • btop instead of top/htop
    • gdu instead of du/ncdu
    • bat instead of cat
    • eza instead of ls
    • fd instead of find
    • ripgrep instead of grep
    • broot instead of tree
    • skim instead of fzf