this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
  • btrfs unless I know I'm not gonna use it that much (might check out bcachefs soon)
  • Kitty as the terminal, life is better without fancy multiplexers
  • Firefox
  • fastfetch > neofetch
  • zsh without oh-my-zsh
  • tbsm as DM (if available)
  • Hyprland as the WM
  • Plasma if I have to use a DE
  • ~~Swapfile instead of partition so I don't risk losing my data if I don't have enough memory (haven't checked out ZRAM yet)~~ Welp that changed quickly, ZRAM looks insane
  • GRUB as bootloader, also a separate install for every distro, kinda just out of fear that I'll break it somehow
[–] Presi300 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

zram... Obvious

systemdboot (unless I'm on a distro without systemd)... My main desktop is running Gentoo OpenRC atm

xanmod kernel... It's literally just free performance

wayland... I have 3 monitors with 3 different refresh rates and 3 different resolutions, X11 just isn't an option for me (smooth animations are a bonus to ig)

Unlock origin, ecosia and dark reader as extensions, regardless of browser

VSCode... I like FOSS software as much as the next guy, but I want my code editor to just work with minimal to no configuration

Fish shell, has the best autocomplete and integration of any shell

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nice, I second VSCode, although I have always a VIM version for the quick edits installed.

I just checked the website for xanmod and it looks interesting, several questions:

  • Do you really use it on a desktop? (The website seems to suggest it is optimized for server loads)
  • How exactly do you experience the difference in performance?
  • What is your most low tech computer you run xanmod on? (I simply heard too many times, that nowadays there is no good reason to compile your own kernel unless you have very specific needs.)
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