Make "GPU Compute" the default for Cycles.
There's not much more to add. I can think of no reason to use CPU Compute unless you have a low quality graphics card, but I would dare say that most people have an adequate graphics card and will never use CPU Compute. It's annoying to have to switch this every time I switch to Cycles.
3 Comments
While I agree with your hypothesis that most people probably have good enough GPUs, GPU rendering tends to be less stable than CPU rendering in Blender. To avoid frequent crashes for the general user base, I wouldn't recommend it as a global default. And that's without saying that GPU compute needs one more step to work properly (in the preferences). For your personal case though, you can easily set GPU Compute as your personal default by saving it into your startup file.
Coming from the Unofficial Blender Discord, and an active helper there, I can promise you that setting GPU compute as the default would be an absolute disaster.
Also, which would be the default? RTX? CUDA? HIP? OneAPI?
Lastly, your problem has a simple solution, open a new file, set Cycles to GPU and save this as a startup file, you could change other things and you'll have a new set of defaults to your liking.
Oh well. It sounded like a good idea. Changing the start up file is the best approach. I honestly forgot about that.