Your chosen desktop Linux defaults?

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

Vorthas,
@Vorthas@lemmy.ml avatar

EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.

Depending on the DE, if it’s not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.

  • Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
  • Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
  • Kitty as my terminal of choice.
  • Clementine as my music player of choice
  • yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
  • htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look
  • exa over ls
wolf,

Interesting browser choices. ;-) I like what I see from Vivaldi, but I rarely need Chrome compatibility and Chromium is in the repositories of all distributions I use, so I never opt for Vivaldi. Just a personal preference or any good reason to use Vivaldi over Chromium etc.?

Vorthas,
@Vorthas@lemmy.ml avatar

Honestly because it’s quite customizable, that’s about it. Being able to customize my software to look and work the way I want them to is a big reason why I use certain programs over others.

vettnerk, (edited )

Nothing radical, but I’ve used mplayer as default video player since FreeBSD 4.0, and that’s not changing any time soon. VLC is good and all, I just prefer mplayer.

Oh, and for general purpose storage partitions I use XFS, as it plays nice with beegfs.

barrett9h,

why not mpv?

Kerb,
@Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

i always use:

  • KDE
  • yakuake
  • kate
  • vlc
  • fishshell
  • gparted
  • firefox

no matter what the default might be

backhdlp, (edited )
@backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar
  • 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
  • https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/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
offspec,

I tried to use kitty but I have to ssh in to remote machines often for work, usually one of a few hundred edge devices, and I can’t configure them all to work properly with it. Is solid ssh support just not a deal breaker for others?

backhdlp,
@backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I never had a reason to use SSH after I switched to Kitty.

Presi300, (edited )
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

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

wolf,

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.)
Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

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.

AMDIsOurLord,

You could use VSCodium fork. I mean, it’s still the same exact shit, and I use it everyday without ANY observable difference to official builds of VSCode. Unless you end up joining the dark side one day and install 2000 ViM extentions lol

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

I need to do extra shit for extensions and I just don’t wanna bother

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