Full disk encryption?

Hi, after a long search for a just-works distro, I'm about to settle for Zorin OS 17.1.
My only question is, does it feature an out of the box full disk encryption solution?
I've only found one mention on Reddit of activating LUKS during the installation process, but I haven't found any mention of it anywhere else.

Also, it seems that I can't enable 2FA on my Zorin Forum account. Is it just me?

Hi, and welcome!

Yes, you can use full disk encryption with Zorin OS. Please take a look at this thread:

You mean you cannot set it up, or you cannot use the code correctly? It's working fine for me right now, but please start a new thread for this as it's a different issue. This will help with finding topics later on in case it's needed.

Thanks for linking that thread.

  • Why is there so little advertisement about this feature? For Windows and other Linux-based distros this is usually (at least a minor) selling point.
  • Is there any official documentation? I'd like to know at least the algorithm used to encrypt the data.
  • Also, how well will I fare with a full-disk encryption of a 10 year-old laptop? I'm pretty sure it's some sort of ThinkPad, but I can't recall the specs.

Regarding the 2FA set up, I already solved it, my browser just blocked the pop-up.

I don't know why this isn't offered more prominently, but I also don't think this is a big deal; for those who want to get it, it's easy enough to find and setup.

As for the documentation, I never bothered to check this to be honest (I only ever used it once anyway) but you can find all about it here:

As far as I can tell, the default encryption algorithm is AES-256 with XTS cipher mode. There was an instruction set created to compute operations for AES a while ago. Your laptop probably has it (you can check in that link), and even if it doesn't it just means that it won't be as quickly and efficient. Either way, it should work fine.

Be warned though, that some people here on the forums have reported issues with full-disk encryption before. I'm not sure if it was with Zorin OS specifically although that shouldn't really matter as this happens at the kernel-level, but it's something to consider. If the data gets corrupted at some point for whatever reason you might have trouble getting it back, so be sure to add backups to your strategy.

Thanks for the answer.

so be sure to add backups to your strategy

This reminds me, what file system should my flash drive use for file transfers between Linux and old Windows (aka xp/98) systems? I presume FAT32 would give me the best results with small files?

Normally I would suggest NTFS. I can't remember if XP used this file system, but FAT32 is always a safe bet. As long as you don't have files over 4GB in size (I think that was the limit for FAT32).

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