this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used disk encryption. Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows have been increasingly using encryption by default. On the other hand, while most Linux installers I've encountered include the option to encrypt, it is not selected by default.

Whether it's a test bench, beater laptop, NAS, or daily driver, I encrypt for peace of mind. Whatever I end up doing on my machines, I can be pretty confident my data won't end up in the wrong hands if the drive is stolen or lost and can be erased by simply overwriting the LUKS header. Recovering from an unbootable state or copying files out from an encrypted boot drive only takes a couple more commands compared to an unencrypted setup.

But that's just me and I'm curious to hear what other reasons to encrypt or not to encrypt are out there.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I encrypt my laptop and desktops and I think it’s worth it. I regret encrypting my servers because they need passwords to turn on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes. I encrypt because theft. I know PopOS and Mint make it 1-click ez. ...unless of course you want home and root on a separate drives. That scales difficulty real fast. There's plenty of tutorials, and I managed, but I had to patch together different ones to get a basic setup-- Never mind understanding exactly what I did and repeating it (the latest challenge I've been dragging my feet on). I do hope this is an area that sees more development in the near future.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can't easily facilitate that then it's not quite RTM for my use case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Of course, I'm paranoid and don't trust the US government. Or any government really. "First they came for _____" and all that; Id rather just tell them to pound sand immediately instead of get caught with my pants down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

All my important files are on a NAS, so if someone steals my laptop, there's nothing of value there without being able to log in and mount the remote file systems

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Doesn't Pop have that by default? I think others have too.

Anyway, yes for basically everything. Except my servers main partition, because otherwise recovering from crashes would be horribly annoying or unsafe if I'd use cryptssh. And if the dns+dhcp/gateway/VPN server crashes I'd definitely need 22 open.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Absolutely. LUKS full disk encryption. Comes as an opt-in checkbox on Ubuntu, for example.

And I too cannot understand why this is not opt-out rather than opt-in. Apparently we've decided that only normies on corporate spyware OSs need security, and we don't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (10 children)

There is a major downside to encryption: If you forget your password or your tpm fails and you've not backed things up, then that data is gone forever. If someone doesn't have anything incriminating or useful to theives on their device, the easier reparability might justify not enabling it.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I encrypt my desktop and laptop but not my servers. On desktop, that excludes drives that aren't my OS/boot drive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (9 children)

I encrypt my laptop and desktops and I think it’s worth it. I regret encrypting my servers because they need passwords to turn on. I couldn’t figure out how to handle it when away.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I do not as I do not have any sensitive data and what data is sensitive are the digital documents which are securely encrypted by default via id card and its passwords.

If I start having something worth protecting I will turn on fedoras encryption. But until then anyone who manages to steal my 100 eur thinkpad and guess its password is welcome to try out linux and see if they like it I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Only encrypt the home partition, for the root partition it just unnecessarily slows down the system.

Also, I think, there could be different approaches instead of encryption. AFAIK, android doesn't use encryption underneath, but uses a semi-closed bootloader (which means, if you install a different OS, all user data gets wiped). I'm currently investigating the feasibility of such an approach in the long term.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I don't do it for my desktop because 1) I highly doubt my desktop would get stolen. 2) I installed Linux before I was aware of encryption, and don't have any desire to do a reinstall on my desktop at this time.

For my laptop, yes, I do (with exception of the boot partition), since it would be trivial to steal and this is a more recent install. I use clevis to auto-unlock the drive by getting keys from the TPM. I need to better protect myself against evil maids, though - luckily according to the Arch Wiki Clevis supports PCR registers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yes because my distro also have encrypted /boot included

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Mostly I don't, but I want to start to. I only have one laptop encrypted and of course I keep my phones encrypted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yes because it is one click

If I delete my drive, it is rubbish

It doesnt impact my performance much

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I don’t have FDE (BitLocker) enabled on my Windows 11 gaming PC. It sits in my house and has nothing on it but video games and video game related shit. I don’t even have my password manager installed for logging in to Steam, GoG or whatever other launcher. I manually type passwords in from the vault on my phone if the app doesn’t support QR code login like discord. Also I paid for this ridiculous m.2 nvme drive, I’m not going to just give up iops bc i want my game install files encrypted.

I don’t use FDE on my NAS. Again it doesn’t leave my house. I probably should I guess, bc there is some stuff on there that would cause me to have industry certs revoked if they leaked, but idk I don’t. Everything irreplaceable is backed up off site, but the down time it would take to rebuild my pirated media libraries from scratch vs just swapping disks and rebuilding has me leery.

I have FDE enabled on both my MacBooks. They leave the house with me, it seems to make sense.

I don’t use FDE on Linux VMs I create on the MacBooks, the disk is already encrypted.

My iphone doesn’t have the option to not use FDE I don’t think.

I use encrypted rsync backups to store NAS stuff in the cloud. I use a PGP key on my yubikey to further encrypt specific files on my MacBooks as required beyond the general FDE.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I encrypt my home folder and Windows install just in case someone breaks into my house and steals my computer. Super annoying entering my password each boot though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I don't, I didn't do it back then and I ended up using this system for much longer than I thought I would(4+ years). I want to do it next time but I don't feel like reinstalling just for that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah all my drives are encrypted with LUKS mostly because of home burglaries (bad area and whatnot). I still keep backups regardless on drives that are also encrypted

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