Full Disk Encryption. Smooth Upgrade & Daily Use?

[azzamsa]

Hi,

I’m interested in trying SpiralLinux and planning to enable full-disk encryption during installation. Before I dive in, I’d like to ask:

• How smooth is the upgrade experience when using full-disk encryption?
• For daily use (booting, unlocking, performance), does everything work smoothly?

Thanks for SpiralLinux 🍰

[marwenius]

I wrote something about my experiences there, and my recommendation would be: slowly increase the iterations until you reach the sweet spot for your purposes:

• https://github.com/orgs/SpiralLinux/discussions/497

Otherwise, you may have to wait a few minutes or, in the worst case, much longer (hours, days, ...) for the partition(s) to be unlocked.

In everyday use, I don't notice any difference in speed compared to an unencrypted system.

[azzamsa]

Ah, I see.
Yes, I need to wait ~1-2 minutes.
In Fedora/EndeavourOS, it only took couple seconds.

Thanks for taking time to reply. 🧁

[marwenius]

You're welcome :)

Regarding the other question: I had no problems updating to Trixie with FDE (including encrypted swap partition with hibernation).

After I had adjusted the source files, the upgrade ran smoothly with these commands:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt full-upgrade

[azzamsa]

Things didn’t go so well on my end.

The installation went smoothly, I do update -> upgrade -> reboot -> upgrade to 13. But after I upgraded and rebooted to Debian 13, the machine failed to boot. I just got a black screen, and if I remember correctly, the BIOS couldn’t even detect the bootloader on that drive.

I’m not new to Debian. I’ve done plenty of upgrades before, but I have no idea why this one failed. So I’ve decided to stick with ODIN Debian this time. I’m not sure whether it had anything to do with the encrypted install or not.

[azzamsa]

Update:

During the upgrade I started with Nala, then switched to APT halfway after reading about possible dist-upgrade issues with Nala. That may have caused my problem. Please follow the wiki instructions and perform a full upgrade.