No simple encrypted installation

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

this is rather a feature request than a bug report.

When installing using ubiquity (e.g. Xubuntu desktop), there is only two options to install an encrypted machine, either with lvm or with zfs.

In most cases of reqular notebooks or desktop systems, both don't make sense, and are overcomplicated and error prone, especially since lvm doesn't use the full disk in most cases, and requires advanced admin skills to use the disk.

A better solution would be to offer the smart and simple version, as an option, i.e. just put an ext4 filesystem into the encrypted partition, and have a swap file inside that file system.

Yes, I do know that this is possible using the manual installation option (and that's how I installed Ubuntu for more than ten years). But this is not feasible for most users and requires some knowledge about how to make the UEFI partition and which size is required, which is, to the best of my knowledge, not documented.

Ubiquity should really offer a smart and simple, yet encrypted layout. The reality is, that most, probably more than 95% of desktop installations just don't need lvm or zfs for their main ssd.

regards

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

The given layout actually does not make much sense.

I have just installed a Xubuntu machine with 64 GB RAM and 2TB SSD.

The LVM swap partition created by ubiquity is 1,91 GB large, and thus merely useless and cannot be used to store data for hibernation or to free a significant part of the RAM, and cannot be increased since ubuiquity used all the 2TB LVM.

The root partition, on the other hand, occupies 1.82 TiB, and thus all available ssd space.

What's the point in using LVM here?

It would have been much better to either ask and occupy e.g. just 300MB of the available ssd space, or to not use LVM at all.

It ssems as if that had been invented about 10 years ago and never been reviewed since.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.