Last week, the upstream project for a package I maintain was discussing whether or not to enable autosave in the default configuration. I said if the project doesn’t, I may consider making that the default in the Fedora package. Another commenter said “is it a good idea to have different default settings per packaging ? (ubuntu/fedora/windows)”

My take? Absolutely yes. As I said in the post on “rolling stable” distros, a Linux distribution is more than an assortment of packages; it is a cohesive whole. This necessarily requires changes to upstream defaults.

Changes to enable a functional, cohesive whole are necessary, of course. But there’s more than “it works”, there’s “it works the way we think it should.” A Linux distribution targets a certain audience (or audiences). Distribution maintainers have to make choices to make the distro meet that audience’s needs. They are not mindless build systems.

Of course, opinions do have a cost. If a particular piece of software works differently from one distro to another, users get confused. Documentation may be wrong, sometimes harmfully so. Upstream developers may have trouble debugging issues if they are not familiar with the distro’s changes.

Thus, opinions should be implemented judiciously. But when a maintainer has given a change due thought, they should make it.