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

  • Jezza
    1•1 year ago

    I have a question about swap.

    My current rig has 64 gb, and I opted to not create a swap partition. My logic being I have more than enough.

    The question is does swap ever get used for non-overflow reasons? I would have expected 64 GB to be more than enough to keep most applications in memory. (including whatever the kernel wants to cache)

    • @virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee
      1•1 year ago

      I believe so, though I went without swap for a while myself and never noticed any issues. When in doubt a 1gb swap partition can’t hurt.

      • lemmyvoreEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Start with a small swap file (100 MB) and see how much gets used, no need to waste 1 GB.

    • lemmyvoreEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I also have 64 GB and yes, it gets used. For very low quantities, mind you, we’re talking couple hundred KB at most, and only if you don’t reboot for extended periods of time (including suspend time).

      Creating a big swap is not needed, but if you add one that’s a couple hundred MB you will see it gets used eventually.

      You don’t have to create a swap partition, you can create a swap file (with dd, mkswap, swapon and /etc/fstab). You can also look into zswap.

      Swap is not meant as overflow “disk RAM”, it’s meant as a particular type of data cache. It can be used when you run out of RAM but the system will be extremely slow when that happens and most users would just reboot.