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):
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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.
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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).
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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
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
preandpostsnapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.Nice use case for snapshots! :-) I'll put it in my backlog, perhaps it is a nice insurance for my crash prone machines.