1y ago

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 (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

73 comments

KDE, just because it's a good balance of usability and customisability.

I don't think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It's an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I'm back to good ol' Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.
- Nice use case for snapshots! :-) I'll put it in my backlog, perhaps it is a nice insurance for my crash prone machines.
- Please tell me more about Spiral Linux. I'm not a huge Debian fan personally(at least for desktop), but I often install Linux on other people's machines. And Mint/ Debian is great for them.
  How does it differ from stock?
  
  Details on the Spiral Linux web site: https://spirallinux.github.io/
  Key points are BTRFS with Snapper, PipeWire, newer kernels and some other niceties from backports, proprietary drivers/codecs by default, VirtualBox support (which I've personally had huge problems with in the past on multiple distros). They also mention font tweaks, but I haven't done side-by-side comparisons, so I'm not sure exactly what that means.
  Edit: shoutout to Spiral Linux creator @sb56637@lemmy.ca , who posted a few illuminating comments on this older thread: https://lemmy.ca/post/6855079 (if there's a way to link to posts in an instance-agnostic way on Lemmy, please let me know!)
  
  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...

NixOS
disko + nixos-anywhere (automatic partitioning & remote installation of new systems)
stylix (system-wide theming)
agenix (secret management)
impermanence (managing persistent data)
nixos containers for sandboxing applications & services (using systemd-nspawn)

TMPFS as /
LUKS
BTRFS as /nix (might try bcachefs)
SWAP partition (= RAM size, to susbend to disk)

Greetd with TUIgreet (DM)
SwayFX (WM)
Kitty & foot (term)
Nushell (shell)
Helix (editor)
Firefox (browser)
slackhq/nebula (c.f. self-hosted tailscale, connecting my systems beyond double NATs)
EDIT1: fix "DE" -> "DM"
- This is a very interesting setup would you mind providing more explanation / documentation? Also would you mind sharing your nixOS config? I would love to try it.
  
  My system configuration can be found on git.sr.ht/~sntx/flake. I've linked the file tree pinned to the version 0.1.1 of my config, since I'm currrently restructuring the entire config[^{1] as the current tree is non-optimal[}2].
  The documentation in the README in combination with the files should cover most of what I've described, with the following exception: disko is not present to the repo yet, since I've set it up with a forked version of my config and the merge depends on finishing the restructuring of my system configuration.
  You can take a look at these (non-declarative) installation steps to get an idea on how TMPFS as root can be setup
  If you're interested, I can also DM you the disko expression for it
  [^1]: The goal is to provide definitions for desktops, user-packages, system-packages, themes and users. Each system can then enable a set of users, which in turn have their own desktop, user-packages and theme. A system can also enable system-packages for itself, independent of users. If a user is enabled that has a desktop set, the system will need to have display-manager set as well, which should launch the users configured desktop.
  [^2]: The current config assumes a primary user, and can only configure a single DE and apply the application/service configs only to that user.
- Now that's quite an interesting NixOS setup, I'm especially intrigued by the tmpfs root portion. The link you provided was a great read, and I'll keep this and honestly most of what you've described in mind for when I mess with NixOS again.
  
  There are also these two blog posts by elis on setting up tmpfs specifically. Though these posts rather are setup guides, than "talking about the philosophy" of systems design.
  tmpfs as root
  tmpfs as home

Nobara KDE user here. One of the reasons why I chose it is because it comes with many of the customisations that I'd normally do (such as using an optimized kernel). But in addition, I use:
Opal instead of LUKS
KDE configured with a more GNOME/macOS like layout (top panel+side dock)
GDM instead of SDDM, for fingerprint login
Fingerprint authentication for sudo
TLP instead of power-profiles-daemon for better power saving (AMD P-State EPP control, charging thresholds etc)
Yakuake terminal (and Kitty for ad-hoc stuff)
fish shell instead of bash
mosh instead of ssh
btop instead of top/htop
gdu instead of du/ncdu
bat instead of cat
eza instead of ls
fd instead of find
ripgrep instead of grep
broot instead of tree
skim instead of fzf
- Impressive list! What is the benefit of using Opal compared to LUKS?
  
  Opal drives are self-encrypting, so they're done by the disk's own controller transparently. The main advantage is that there's almost no performance overhead because the encryption is fully hardware backed. The second advantage is that the encryption is transparent to the OS - so you could have a multi-boot OS setup (Windows and FreeBSD etc) all on the same encrypted drive, so there's no need to bother with Bitlocker, Veracrypt etc to secure your other OSes. This also means you no longer have a the bootloader limitation of not being able to boot from an encrypted boot partition, like in the case of certain filesystems. And because your entire disk is encrypted (including the ESP), it's more secure.

LUKS
Btrfs
sway

My next project is to slim down my Gnome desktop installation, but I guess this is quite common in the Debian community.
This is pretty easy on Debian.
Uncheck all tasksel entries during initial installation
Reboot
sudo apt install gnome-shell gnome-terminal nautilus
Reboot again.
It'll boot right into a fully functional Gnome desktop and hardly anything else. The only extra software this installs are yelp, gnome-shell-extension-prefs and network-manager-gnome. Uninstall them with sudo apt purge and sudo apt autoremove --purge if you don't need them. sudo apt install cups if you need printing and remove your wifi device from /etc/network/devices to let network-manager-gnome handle wifi if you use it.
Your system will require 2.8GB of disk space.
- Yes Debian, then use Flatpack to get all the latest desktop software and enjoy.
  
  Yep, that's exactly the purpose of this.
- Thanks for the list.
  The way I setup my minimal systems is to uncheck everything during tasksel, then switch to another virtual console, chroot to /target and install what I need. Saves one reboot and hassles, when installing via thump drive. (Did this for Xfce in the past.)

I've never had a problem with ext4 after power failure.
Zram is not a substitute for swap. Your system is less optimal by not having at least a small swap.
Firewalls should never default to on. It's an advanced tool and it should be left to advanced users.
Not to mention how much grief it would cause distro maintainers. If they don't auto configure the firewall they get blasted by people who don't know why their stuff isn't working. If they auto configure they get blasted by people upset that the auto configurator dared change their precious firewall rules. You just can't win.
- Honnestly. Firewalls shut be enabled by default. Specially on laptops connecting to public places.
  A good default shut be choosen by the disteo maintainer. A default shut not overwrite your own config. Like any config really. So no upset folks that like to change the firewall. Also if you dont block much outgoing trafic you are not likely to run into problems. And for people that like to poke holes in the incoming trafic. Your a "advanced" user anyway.
  
  So what should happen when the user installs a service that needs an open port in order to work? Presumably the whole point of installing it being to, you know, use it.
- 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.
- Why does not having swap make the system less optimal? Considering obviously it has more than enough ram available.
  
  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.
- 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)
  
  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.
  
  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.

What about fedora silverblue? Would it have saved you?
- I totally love the idea of Fedora Silverblue and UBlue. Played around with Silverblue and perhaps it will replace my Debian installation on my multi media laptop. Still, no substitute for Debian since the kernel is too new/fast changing (problems with VM and I don't want to pin an old kernel w/o security updates forever) and I have a very custom (but fully automated) setup via Ansible, which wouldn't work like this on Silverblue. (I would have to use Ansible for the host and then create a lot of custom containers, to the best of my understanding.)

Well, almost the opposite of you, I currently use Fedora Silverblue (including BTRFS which I very much appreciate for versioned backups), except that I override GNOME Software (never got it to work properly for me) and Fedora's Firefox (I use the Firefox from Flathub but not Fedora).
- I feel envious - I would love to run Silverblue like you do! :-)

/boot and root partition: i dont use swap (i dont need it, i have plenty of ram) and i usually encrypt the root partition with luks
ext4: ppl keep telling me btrfs is better and all that but idk shit about filesystems and ext4 just works
any x11 wm: currently im using qtile and ive used bunch of wms in the past
alacritty: its fast and it has easy config with great doc
firefox with arkenfox userjs, ublock and tor proxy configuration
(neo)vim
qemu/kvm/virt-manager
doas
fish shell

Gnome with Wayland: I am just too used to the touchpad gestures and sleek looking apps to go back. Even windows looks and behaves janky in comparison
Firefox: plain better than the alternatives, the scrolling is so much better under Wayland too
The auto dark mode GNOME extention: it between dark and light mode depending on the time of day
Rounded window corners GNOME extension: forces all 4 corners of applications to have rounded corners
Separate /home partition, very useful for distro hopping or in case just going the nuclear option and reinstalling everything is the easiest way to deal with a breakage

Xfs filesystem and a kernel with BORE scheduler, which are the default on CachyOs for a faster and snappier system.

Once, some years back, I posted a topic on how could I slim down my Gnome DE.
It sparked a rather long and complex discussion and the bottom line was that Gnome integration was already at a point where so many parts depended on so many it was not an easy task.
I opted to move to a GTK compatible DE. Currently I use XFCE but spent years with Mate.
- Xfce / Mate are great (and lightweight) options!
  I used Mate for years, but at some point it became unstable for me. I need Wayland, though, so I have to hold my breath until Xfce supports it in the future.
- I still use Mate, but switched the window manager to i3.

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.
- why not mpv?

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
- 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.?
  
  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.

Fedora Workstation (i.e. the Gnome one)
Separate /home partition
Then the only other changes are to a few keyboard shortcuts, icons, and changing Firefox to a GTK4-style theme.
- I'm coming back to linux as a main desktop, finally ditching windows (again). I tried out fedora workstation and the fedora KDE spin. KdE looks so good now, before i atteibuted it to a windows wanna-be knock off. This was back in the windows xp days... now it looks so polished. I probably prefer it to gnome because I've been a windows user for so long but gnome is nice with its minimal approach, looks nice and clean. Can't get away from how nice KDE looks though, I'm going to stick with that I think.

Void
EFI and LUKS partition, containing an LVM with root/home/swap. Ext4 partitions. I'm vaguely aware of btrfs and zram but haven't taken them for a spin yet.
ufw
wayland
basic plasma install + desired apps.

i always use:
KDE
yakuake
kate
vlc
fishshell
gparted
firefox
no matter what the default might be

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

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
- 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
  
  I need to do extra shit for extensions and I just don't wanna bother
- 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.)
  
  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.

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