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 ™.
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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
How does it differ from stock?
Well for one thing their driver support is apparently “harrowing”. 😊
I will never understand why people choose distributions that will brick themselves when the wind blows, so they add snapshot support as a band-aid, and then they celebrate “woo hoo, it takes pre and post snapshots after every package install!”
How about using a distro where you never have to restore a snapshot…
To clarify, this is my first time using Spiral Linux. My experience regarding Nvidia drivers is across several different distros (most recently Ubuntu LTS and OpenSuse Tumbleweed). I have never had a seamless experience. Often the initial driver installation works, but CUDA and related tools are finicky. Sometimes a kernel update breaks everything. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with other kernel extensions.
The Debian version of the drivers didn’t set up Secure Boot properly. Instead, I rolled back and used the generic Nvidia .run installer, which worked fine. Not seamless, obviously, but not really worse than my experience on other distros. In the future I will always just use the generic installers from Nvidia.
Point is, with BTRFS you can just try anything without fear. I’m not going to worry about installing kernel updates from now on, or driver updates, or anything, because if anything goes wrong, it’s no big deal.
And my point is that it’s not normal to fear updates. Any updates, but especially updates to essential packages like the kernel or graphics driver.
If you’re using the experimental branch of a distro or experimental versions of packages on purpose then snapshots are a good tool. But if you’re using a normal distro and its normal packages you should not have to resort to such measures.
