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 (TM).

  • 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.org
    ·
    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.

    • wolf@lemmy.zip
      ·
      8 months ago

      Nice use case for snapshots! :-) I'll put it in my backlog, perhaps it is a nice insurance for my crash prone machines.

  • sntx@lemm.ee
    ·
    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"

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
      ·
      8 months ago

      Now that's quite an interesting NixOS setup, I'm especially intrigued by the tmpfs root portion. The link you provided was a great read, and I'll keep this and honestly most of what you've described in mind for when I mess with NixOS again.

    • wolf@lemmy.zip
      ·
      8 months ago

      I totally love the idea of Fedora Silverblue and UBlue. Played around with Silverblue and perhaps it will replace my Debian installation on my multi media laptop. Still, no substitute for Debian since the kernel is too new/fast changing (problems with VM and I don't want to pin an old kernel w/o security updates forever) and I have a very custom (but fully automated) setup via Ansible, which wouldn't work like this on Silverblue. (I would have to use Ansible for the host and then create a lot of custom containers, to the best of my understanding.)

  • vettnerk@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    Nothing radical, but I've used mplayer as default video player since FreeBSD 4.0, and that's not changing any time soon. VLC is good and all, I just prefer mplayer.

    Oh, and for general purpose storage partitions I use XFS, as it plays nice with beegfs.

  • visnudeva@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    Xfs filesystem and a kernel with BORE scheduler, which are the default on CachyOs for a faster and snappier system.

  • Vorthas@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 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.zip
      ·
      8 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.?

      • Vorthas@lemmy.ml
        ·
        8 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.