Whenever I'm forced to use windows, show file extensions and show hidden files.

Turn on dark mode if it exists

Make Microsoft Windows show filename extensions.

I turn off sounds. I hate computers that whoosh when I do something with windows, beep for no apparent reason, click when something else happens.

Volume goes waaaay down immediately. Then if it has motion blur, that goes all the way away from me.

Disabling the absurdity of 12-hour clock with am/pm, which bizarrely often is the default for no rational reason whatsoever.

Every time I get a new laptop I have to disable "natural" scrolling. Down should be down, dang it.

I enable dark mode on anything that has it.

Terminal apps: I make the cursor non-blinking.

Lemmy: Hide seen posts.

On both Windows and Android I go in and remove all of the bloatware and disable all of the tracking. I also turn off all of the various communications 'features' that are to let devices talk other devices.

on every new android phone i go to developer options and change animation scaling 0.5x, makes the phone feel much quicker

I turn off autocorrect on anything that offers it. Mostly my android phone, but also on LibreOffice or whatever.

I also turn off all auto-capitalize, auto-punctuation, etc. When coding, I also hate auto-indent. If I want something indented, I'll hit tab.

In short, when I put in text, I want my computing devices to get exactly what I explicitly input and nothing else.

I also took out the fuse that powers the Starlink connectivity in my Subaru because Subaru's privacy policy says they'll record any audio in the cabin they damned well please with no notice or consent (except insofar as existing in the cabin constitutes "consent" because their legal department says so) and send those recordings back to the mothership to use in any way they see fit.

"Natural scrolling" or whatever it's called with track pads on laptops where the scroll goes the opposite way your fingers are moving. I don't know why that's the default, it makes no sense.

those 900 partners that respect your privacy

'privacy' sandbox

music-ambient sounds balance

dynamic range specially on movies

frame generation

Every single time I launch a new game the first thing I ALWAYS have to fix is the fuckin audio being way too goddamn loud. Why WHY does every single game have to launch with all the volume set to 100%???

I can't remember what game it was I started played recently, but it had all the volume set to 50% on first launch and my friend and I actually like cheered from joy. That should be the norm not an exception so rare we celebrate it.

If you are a game dev please for the love of God set the default volume to at least 50%. Let the player choose to blow out their eardrums if they want later. Don't force it on all of us. Especially if you have loud music that starts the millisecond the main menu pops up or if you have any unskippable cutscenes before you let them see the volume settings.

About a hundred settings on a computer.

Turn off touchscreen beep on the car infotainment screen.

Disable the "tap to click" function on laptop touchpads.

• disable auto-rotate
• enable dark mode
• increase keyboard repeat rate
• decrease keyboard repeat delay time
• increase mouse/trackpad sensitivity
• decrease idle to suspend time

The list is huge but those are the main things I do not need to install anything to change. They are important to me because I hate slow navigation.

Enable y-axis look inversion. Because which way was "normal" and "inverted" hadn't been standardized when I started gaming and that's what I learned.

On older android devices, I immediately enable developer mode so I can enable "force GPU rendering". You'd be surprised how much of a difference it can make when games are unoptimized and don't use the GPU to render anything. For some reason, this setting was removed from newer versions of android.

Mouse sensitivity. Every game it's just ESC spam until I can get an options menu. Shoutout to the games with a 5m gameplay intro before you can access options. Super double special shoutout to games with 5m of very loud unskippable cutscenes before you can change audio settings.

Usually screen brightness. Why does everyone else want to burn out their eyes?

Lock down permissions to what is actually necessary to function, then expand permissions as i feel they need them.

aesthetics and UI. e.g. this is what my GIMP looks like:

I switch from swipe to buttons on my android phone every single time.

Turning off motion blur and increasing field of view when a game has first person POV. Guaranteed motion sickness for me if I don't adjust each.

First step of playing any and every computer game is immediately going to resolution.

Work makes me use a Mac, and the main setting I always want to change is the power state to off.

Serious answer though, motion blur in games, ick. I also usually turn off audio normalisation and max out the quality settings for streaming audio apps

hide the taskbar.

I used to use WindowMaker as my windowmanager, there was a setting which had the comment "this is annoying", which unless used, wm context menus may be rendered off screen, which is really fucking annoying. I was disrohopping a lot at the time, so it was always "install windowmaker, turn on 'annoying' setting"

Stickykeys

Invert Y-Axis

Dark mode and switch language to English (unless the thing is originally German) not least because it's much easier to find support in English.