After trying several distros with full disk encryption, I noticed that Fedora stands out in how it handles the disk password prompt. It comes with a nice Plymouth setup by default, complete with a clean logo at the bottom, and even shows the hardware logo, similar to what’s described in some guides I’ve seen.
For various reasons, I later moved on and tried other distros, eventually giving EndeavourOS a try. Before installing, I looked up “full disk encryption setup on EndeavourOS” to see if it offered the same polished experience, but I couldn’t find much information or videos about it. After installing, I realized the prompt is quite minimal, more like what Debian uses, very basic.
This isn’t meant as a complaint, since I know it’s always possible to set things up manually. I’m just genuinely curious why this part of the user experience isn’t given the same level of polish as Fedora.
There are multiple reasons we don’t take that path by default.
We have many users that use grub to facilitate snapshot booting and/or seamless system recovery snapshots with btrfs or timeshift. That works because the kernel and initrds are inside the root filesystem. In order to get plymouth to handle the decryption prompt, the kernel and initrds would need to be stored in a separate unencrypted partition. This is what Fedora does. However, that would break the above mentioned use case.
More generally, we don’t use plymouth at all by default since it is very much a form over function proposition. We used to hide all the boot messages by default but we learned it made troubleshooting more difficult when things went wrong during the boot process.
Of course, if you would like to use plymouth, you are more than welcome to do so. We view EOS as a system that is setup to provide a basic, usable system out of the box that you can customize to me your needs.
Wow, I came prepared with possible responses, but this explanation is beyond my expectations.
the kernel and initrds would need to be stored in a separate unencrypted partition. This is what Fedora does.
Ah, yes. That’s why I see this kind of partition on my Fedora system.
We have many users that use grub to facilitate snapshot booting and/or seamless system recovery snapshots with btrfs or timeshift.
That’s new to me! So knowing that “this would break the above mentioned use case,” I can now appreciate it as a design choice rather than a lack of polish.
