Today i took my first steps into the world of Linux by creating a bookable Mint Cinamon USB stick to fuck around on without wiping or portioning my laptop drive.

I realised windows has the biggest vulnerability for the average user.

While booting off of the usb I could access all the data on my laptop without having to input a password.

After some research it appears drives need to be encrypted to prevent this, so how is this not the default case in Windows?

I’m sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.

  • Jhex@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).

    it’s usually an option in the guided disk partition

    If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.

    Linux is about choice, not whatever someone else thinks it’s acceptable

      • Bogus007@lemm.ee
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        16 hours ago

        Defaults are generally who do not want to understand in depth what they are doing (no offence). Example from other sphere: in R-Cran (used to write statistical models), some functions have defaults to either choose a particular algorithm or an optimisation value. I have heard almost about nobody among students, PhDs and even higher up the ladder, who took the time to understand what is happening below the shell. Instead these people took just the defaults, it worked (result was significant), done. However, if they may have chosen another algorithm, things may have turned differently, which would open up a box with many questions concerning modelling adequacy and understanding of data. It is the same with defaults in Linux.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      Echoing Jubilant Jaguar’s sentiment about defaults mattering, I think that sometimes an excess amount of choice can be overwhelming such that a user is less empowered to make choices about things they do care about (Leading to a less steep learning curve). Sensible defaults need not remove anyone’s choice

      • Jhex@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        I don’t disagree with the premise. I may disagree encrypted hard drive by default a sensible choice