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Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

I recenly distro hopped around trying to install an encrypted Linux alongside windows.

The installer used by Ubuntu made this completely manual, roll up your sleeves, set all your volumes up in the terminal. It took ages and was precarious as hell.

The installer used by elementaryOS automated it, though it had a tendency to crash.

The gui installer used by Debian and Manjaro was literally a doddle. Select a dual booting encpyped install and off you go.

I was very surprised that installing Debian would be easier than Ubuntu, and pleased to hear Ubuntu is changing their installer.

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Honestly, I don't know if it is related but I learned it is way better to keep per-disk configuration instead of dual-boot using exactly the same disk but having multiple partitions. These days the SSD disk are really cheap and the simplest and most maintainable configuration is to keep Linux on the one disk, and Windows on the second. I have never experienced any kind of problem having a LUKS partition is such setup. Worthing noting in such setup is the booting partition resides on the disk, related to its OS (i.e. GRUB on Linuxish disk, Windowish boot on the disk with Windows).

Clean reinstall of Windows/Linux? No problem! Just plug off the other disk and install the OS. You don' need to care about losing any data nor reinstalling the GRUB. No "how to-s" nor googling solutions for the issues related to dual boot (except typical timezone switching).

Was going to say the same... I have a PopOS nvme and a Windows 10 nvme... Though tbh, with WSL2/Docker, I rarely boot to the Linux drive.

Yeah I mean, totally fair enough, so long as you're able to use two separate SSD/HDDs - which isn't a given for laptops?

>The installer used by Ubuntu made this completely manual, roll up your sleeves, set all your volumes up in the terminal. It took ages and was precarious as hell.

The Ubuntu installer has been capable of doing disk encryption for several years now, so I'm confused what you mean by this.

I think Ubuntu only makes this easy if you wipe windows. This was an install alongside Windows.

I tried to do the same recently - the roadblock (I recall) having is that encrypting the entire disk is very easy. Encrypting none of an individual partition is very easy. Encrypting just your Ubuntu install and not breaking your windows install is dramatically less plug'n'play.

I'll have to try that when I get home. I seem to remember that being covered, but I may be thinking of Fedora.

Yep, exactly this is what I meant.

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