this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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117
Your chosen desktop Linux defaults? (self.linux)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by wolf to c/[email protected]
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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 (TM).

  • 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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why does not having swap make the system less optimal? Considering obviously it has more than enough ram available.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Swap holds memory pages which are not currently used. Putting them out of the way will optimize the main RAM for normal operations.

It's not a huge difference on a modern fast system with lots of actual RAM but it can be felt on older systems and/or less RAM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So it's not not having swap that makes the system "less optimal" but not having enough RAM if I understand correctly?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They go hand in hand. Given enough RAM you can keep the swap in RAM rather than on disk to make it faster, but you still need swap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm confused, so if there's no swap, what is the system doing given enough RAM? What's the impact?