Comment 23 for bug 1773457

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Paddy Landau (paddy-landau) wrote :

@Dimitri Thanks for your comments. I understand where you are coming from.

I do think, however, that as Ubuntu is intended (and was intended right from day 1) to be "for human beings", it would make hugely more sense to support full-system encryption from the installer. People don't want to be messing around with "install this, then install that, then fix this other thing" especially as it's neither documented nor supported by Canonical.

That's just life.

While technical people love messing around — it's their job, after all! — your average "human being" hates it. (I also dislike it; I put together the method simply because I needed it. I documented the process publicly because I know that there are many, many people like me who need it.)

Also, I have never had good results from installing a desktop environment over an existing system, even something as simple as Lubuntu desktop over an Ubuntu installation.

That, too, is just life.

This request is something that Ubuntu should support. It's not a "nice to have" feature. In today's world, it's a a "got to have" feature, whether for business, government, professionals, salespeople, scientific research, and even personal use. (If I could program, I'd amend the installer myself to implement this — it is open source, after all).

This is made even more urgent by the fact that Ubuntu 18.04 no longer supports encryption at all. Even the recommended workaround, fscrypt, is broken.

I cannot understand the antagonism to this request — it's a proven method; it's not particularly difficult; it's easy enough to modify the existing installer to do this; it's significantly better than the existing options; it uses only proven technology; and it would prove hugely popular, helping to tip the balance to switch to Ubuntu in organisations that are currently uncertain.

I know that I were an internal sysadmin, or a consultant to a professional (I used to be both, decades ago), up to version 16.04 I would have recommended Ubuntu every time without hesitation. But, from 18.04, I absolutely would not, because it's too problematic to install with encryption and then keep it reliably up to date.