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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[–] ngn@lemy.lol 7 points 11 months ago
  • /boot and root partition: i dont use swap (i dont need it, i have plenty of ram) and i usually encrypt the root partition with luks
  • ext4: ppl keep telling me btrfs is better and all that but idk shit about filesystems and ext4 just works
  • any x11 wm: currently im using qtile and ive used bunch of wms in the past
  • alacritty: its fast and it has easy config with great doc
  • firefox with arkenfox userjs, ublock and tor proxy configuration
  • (neo)vim
  • qemu/kvm/virt-manager
  • doas
  • fish shell