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
What is the difference between physical swap and having a swap partition on ZRAM, especially for the kernel? To the best of my knowledge, nearly no Linux distribution supports suspend to disk any more, any ZRAM swap looks for the kernel like … swap. Thanks to the virtual file system. Further, I have high trust in the Fedora community, which decided to use ZRAM.
We can agree to disagree about the firewalls, especially for people who don’t now why their stuff isn’t working, it protects them and is much better than having unconfigured services with open ports on a laptop in a public network IMHO.