Today i took my first steps into the world of Linux by creating a bookable Mint Cinamon USB stick to fuck around on without wiping or portioning my laptop drive.
I realised windows has the biggest vulnerability for the average user.
While booting off of the usb I could access all the data on my laptop without having to input a password.
After some research it appears drives need to be encrypted to prevent this, so how is this not the default case in Windows?
I’m sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.
This is a case where Windows-bashing is hypocritical. Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).
It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO. Whatever the out-of-touch techies around here seem to think, normies do not have lumbering desktop computers any more. They have have mobile devices - at best laptops, mostly not even that.
If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.
No, it’s a choice, because:
History… encryption didn’t exist in the beginning. Upgrades won’t enable it.
Recovery… try telling the people that didn’t backup the encryption key - outside of the encrypted vault - that their data’s gone.
Performance… not such an issue these days, but it does slow your system down (and then everyone complains)
So, please continue to encrypt your data as you choose and be less judgemental on others, esp. anyone new
it’s usually an option in the guided disk partition
Linux is about choice, not whatever someone else thinks it’s acceptable
Sure. But defaults are important.
I always turn on LUKS during install. The only exceptions are when I’m doing tests of different distros on my machine that I lovingly call “FuckAround”.
It really is the best way to find out.