Comment by popcar2

> In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

Which makes each and every one of those totally different operating systems that can run similar code to each other. We need to stop thinking of these as Linux "distros" and start thinking of these as totally separate and distinct operating systems that are based around the Linux kernel. Sort of like a business cooperative model.

yes. i use rhel+derivatives in the datacenter and ubuntu+derivatives outside it. in general. theres an OS for every purpose..or something like that...

Well, for the two examples I named:

vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.

Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop because you only lose about 10% performance and only with specific workloads, but your idle and light load energy consumption improves. Most laptops spend like 95%+ in light or idle load scenarios. Conversely, on a desktop you don't care (much) about idle and light load energy consumption, you only care about keeping max load consumption low enough so that your fans stay quiet. And on a workstation you don't care about a system being whisper quiet so you can go nuts with the energy consumption.

I generally have three types of Linux devices I typically use. My desktop, servers locally/remotely, and "mobile" devices (more like tablets I guess).

For the first, I want the lowest latency for everything I do, together with the highest burstable speed whenever possible, for pretty much all the components.

For the servers, I basically have two types, one which does storage, they just need large disks that can be slow, and one which users actually connect to, that one needs focus on throughput, latency and performance isn't as important as "can serve all requests in a reasonable timeframe, even under load".

Finally, many of the portable devices run on batteries, so on those the focus is power-saving, even if it compromises on performance.

I'm sure others out there have more device types, like ultraweight watches, security devices, monitors, radios and much more. Each one of these have different tradeoffs, and tuning the kernel and OS for each use case makes it a lot better usually. Personally I use NixOS for everything except my desktop (CachyOS right now!), and it makes it really trivial to create profiles based on the same configuration, deployed to all devices, and today they're are tuned for exactly their purpose, as Linus intended :)

Why use Awesome with floating windows?