Why is Numlock turned off by default?

Is there a special reason why NUMLOCK is disabled/turned off by default?

It feels like (when searching the internet) most users (including me) wants to enable it by default.

Solution 1:

To enable it do those commands (install package called numlockx)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install numlockx
sudo sed -i 's|^exit 0.*$|# Numlock enable\n[ -x /usr/bin/numlockx ] \&\& /usr/bin/numlockx on\n\nexit 0|' '/etc/rc.local'

check this community wiki https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NumLock for more information

Why numlock is disabled by default?

I think because of some laptops and netbooks keyboards require numlock to be disabled to function all keys.

For example look at this laptop keyboard, When enabled, NumLock lets you use the 7-8-9, u-i-o, j-k-l and m keys as a numeric keypad.