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.
i’d really like to. but there is ONE big problem:
Keyboard layouts.
seriously
I hate having to deal with that. when I set up my laptop with ubuntu, I tried at least 3 thymes to make it work, but no matter what I tried I was just locked out of my brand-new system. it cant just be y and z being flipped, I tried that, maybe it was the french keyboard layout (which is absolutely fucked) or something else, but it just wouldnt work.
On my mint PC I have a similar problem with the default layout having weird extra keys and I just sort of work around that, because fuck dealing with terminals again. (when logged in it works, because I can manually change it to the right one.)
Now I do have about a TerraByte of storage encrypted, just for the… more sensitive stuff…
While dealing with the problems I stumbled across a story of a user who had to recover their data using muscle-memory, a broken keyboard, the same model of keyboard and probably a lot of patience. good luck to that guy.
Have you tried peppermint or maybe coriander?
Jokes aside, I believe the password entry stage is before any sort of localization happens, meaning what your keyboard looks like doesn’t matter and the input language defaults to English. You have to type as if you’re using an English keyboard. That’s hardly a good solution if you’re unfamiliar with that layout of course.
Initrd has support to configure the keyboard layout used. Consult your initrd generator’s documentation for this