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

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    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.)
    • Presi300English
      3•1 year ago

      Xanmod is a gaming-optimized kernel… Idk where you read the server stuff from and the performance and the difference isn’t so much in performance… I mean there is still an uplift there but it’s more improved frame consistency (less microstutters) the games just feel more snappy.

      Idk what you mean by “low tech computer” but I’ll assume that means “weakest”, I run xanmod on my main desktop PC, which is the only computer I game on, so it only makes sense there. It does tend to kill battery life on laptops and idk anything about getting it to work with nvidia (I’m on AMD). As for the “weakest” computer I’ve ran it on… tbh I don’t remember, I don’t really use a lot of low-end PCs in my daily life.

      As for compiling xanmod, no reason to, 90% of the distros either have it in their main repos, or in the AUR on arch or on a copr repo on fedora. I did compile and configure it myself (I use gentoo) but the performance difference between the packaged version of xanmod and the one you compile yourself is minimal, most of the uplift comes from the kernel itself.

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Thanks for your elaboration.

        When I scanned the website, I read this

        “The real-time version is recommended for critical runtime applications such as Linux gaming server / client for eSports, streaming, live productions and ultra-low latency enthusiasts.”

        and saw that they optimize IO. (I missed the word ‘client’ above.)

        Nowadays I do my gaming on a SteamDeck, I don’t own a PC powerful enough to be useful for gaming. Don’t know about Valves changes to the kernel, but I never encountered any stutters with the Deck. If I ever find the time to build a gaming PC, I’ll give this kernel a try!

        … and sorry again, I wrote not very clear (non native English speaker): I wanted to express, that I always hear/read that nowadays one should simply stick to the default kernel in the distributions. Was not aware that there are big differences for gaming.