Moving to LUKS

General
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What’s the most pain free way to move from Linux home folder encryption only to LUKS FDE?

Using Linux Mint on a 1tb NVME

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The least painful path is probably:

  1. Back up your data on another drive.
  2. Reinstall Mint with LUKS full-disk encryption enabled.
  3. Restore your home data.

Think also about system settings such global configurations, for example you may want to back up /etc as well as export lists of installed packages:

apt list --installed
flatpak list --app 
# etc.
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  1. Copy the entire home-folder incl. meta-data to another external drive
  2. Reinstall Linux (maybe try out something like Fedora)
  3. Get the home folder from the external drive and copy the files you need.
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Interesting - why do you say to try out Fedora?

I have been using Linux Mint for maybe a year now and just have not been tempted to try anything else. I feel like it just works so well.

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Linux Mint was good, but they started to become a bad distro in the last years.

They lack behind in every way. For example is Mint shipping an ancient version of XWayland. There is no VRR or HDR support. Cinnamon (the DE if Mint) is a cobbled-together DE out of GNOME and some applications are based of GNOME 38.
The hardware drivers on Mint are compared to Ubuntu or Fedora pretty old and newer hardware has really bad support or does not work at all.
Mint is based of Ubtuntu LTS which also explains a bit way the lack so much behind packages, but this also creates a security concern regarding kernel patches.

Their AppArmor is enabled, but not really doing anything. But this is more an issue of general Linux. On Fedora you have SELinux that actually has an okay default config that does actually try to protect the user.

Linux Mint tries to push users to Home-folder encryption instead of FDE, which in my eyes is a pretty big issue.

Also, X11 is used by default in Mint through Cinnamon, which creates another security issue due the lack of isolation.

Edit:
There are other you can try like Ubuntu, SecureBlue (pretty hard for a beginner) or Fedora Atomic.
But I would argue that Fedora is better and more modern than Ubuntu and SecureBlue is to hard for a beginner. So I see Fedora as a good middle ground for you.

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Thanks for taking the time to write this, appreciate it.

Could you explain the practical implications? I really like the idea of using SELinux, security is important to me, how much of a difference does that actually make?

I agree it’s silly LM doesn’t enable FDE by default, I guess it’s trying to appeal to people moving from Windows and they might think it’s weird to enter a password twice. That being said, I hugely regret not opting for LUKS.

I kind of thought Linux was some hackerman shit but honestly it’s easier than Windows, at least with Mint, is Fedora pretty much the same? I have used TailsOS too which was really straightforward. I am not really a technical user, though over the course of using Mint I now use the terminal quite a lot, for stuff like vim, ffmpeg, pdfunite, and general system stuff.

Ubuntu just seems like a bloated and corporate version of Linux Mint tbh, never understood why someone would choose to use that over Mint.

A huge priority, maybe the biggest for me, is stability. I love tinkering for hours with stuff when I am in the mood, but if I have a deadline and need to get shit done, I cannot play around with drivers all day. With LM, I have literally not had a single thing I have had to do to fix stuff. Maybe a reboot the whole time. How much more “work” is Fedora in this respect?

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Pretty simple.

Just make full backup (don’t forget to add /home inclusion in it in settings!) via TimeShift. Then reinstall system from scratch with FDE enabled. And then go to TimeShift (pre installed) and restore backup.

P.S: TimeShift supports FDE external disks too. You can go with LUKS on external drive too.

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is there something like “brew bundle dump --force --describe” for Linux? Packages overview for all package managers..

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Just wanted to say I moved to Fedora KDE, way prefer it thanks for the rec. Feels more modern, and I like some of the security features like SELinux, default firewall config and KDE vaults.

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Good to hear that it worked well for you.
I hope the switch and data migration was not a big issue.

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