Interests: News, Finance, Computer, Science, Tech, and Living
I like Zim for large knowledge base collections. It is a desktop wiki. For quick short mobile notes I use Joplin. Never used it but logseq is taked about. It seems more of a Journal.
I sync via Nextcloud.
For alternatives see alternativeto.net.
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I assume it has something to do with how secure boot, the TPM, and Bitlocker interact.
I get it. Credential storage and recovery is a big issue. People vary in skill, ability to keep track of keys or remember how to use them, and they may not have a password manager, safe deposite box, or other locked storage to store them in.
Bittlocker is a pain. Simply booting a maintainance disk requied me to use the recovery codes to get back into windows.
Give her and your personal representatives the keys or access to the keys. Problem solved.
Same problem as you passwords and password manager.
Servers are harder and not preconfigued if you want unattended boot. The first key has to come from somewhere typically to unlock the root partition. The other keys can then be stored on that encrypted partition and are typically referenced by crypttab for auto unlock.
The first key can come from anywhere you want such as attached media like a flash drive, a over the network say via ssh, from a key server, or from the TPM. Or you could remotely connect to the console. There are bunch of how tos out there. It amounts to customizing the boot process and the initramfs. It is not simple. What makes sense depends on the threat model.
Disk encryption does not impact file sharing over the network.
Sure if you sharing by a USB portable drive you have to unlock and lock it every time you use it. That is separate thing though.
The bigger issues of encryption are one should have a good backup and recovery plan both for media and for the keys. One has to consider legacy planning too. How do your personal representatives access.
Your recovery problem was a backup issue not an encryption issue. Consider addressing the backup issue.
Android uses verified boot then encrypts the various profiles and the new private space seprately. This is how my GrapheneOS phone works.
Linux has a bunch of options. Ubuntu use to suggest per user encryption by ecryptfs but has since gone to partition based encryption via dm-crypt/LUKS. I still use either or both depending though ecryptfs seems depricated/discontinued and on the next upgrade I may discontinue.
Linux can support vaults too. Just locking certain folders. Encfs, and gocryptfs can do this for example. I use encfs though perhaps gocryptfs is a better choice these days. One can also use partition based solutions like dm-crypfs/LUKS or maybe even veracrypt too.
This is the primary reason for me as well. Drive disposal. Also since we only get electronic statements, want to encrypt those.
I use hot mount SATA slots for backup and other media. Not that common on workstations. Sure, common on servers.
Yes, that is why I see little value in a TPM for this sort of thing. That is at least for motherboard attached TPMs.
Keep in mind that you have to decide where your going to get the primary unlock key from and how your going to secure it. Standard way is to supply the primary key for the root partition on boot via the console and then the other keys are stored in the root partition.
There are other ways to get the primary key. You can get it from a TPM, a network key server, from other media, etc. These are not standard and have to be set up. What is best depends on threat model.
Eject is not just for CDs. You still have to eject any hot mount physical media. Sadly the eject command only works in some cases. I do not think it works for hot mount SATA dives for example.
You get an IT staff that is MS and Windows certified, what sort of answer do you expect them to give? As far as IT staff where I worked, they often had issues with resolving Windows problems say nothing about Linux. Generally for Windows, I had to get to level 3 support before they knew anything. Even then I often had to tell them what needed to be done rather then them actually knowing. Some of this is lack of skill, some if it is under staffing, some of it is restrictive processes, and some organizational issues. You had to know how to work the system on one hand, and which issues just to not waste time on. Not saying they did not try hard, but without facilitation their results were often insufficient.
That does not mean you cannot use Linux however. Just means the main IT group does not support. We had a separate group that ran the Linux compute cluster we used. I also typically always had a Linux VM on my workstation too to use FOSS tools. Not sure that would be allowed these days since IT has gotten nuts about security, and with that they have generally grabbed a lot of power regarding what can and cannot be done on “their” hardware and on “their” networks. You can also get exceptions to a lot of those rules if you can justify it and if your management is willing to run it up the flag pole. If not, your working for the wrong people.
Not sure I would call Zim bare bones and it does basically most of what your asking. What I like about Zim is it can handle notebooks of many thousands of notes plus it is all just a folder tree in the file system which means you can use standard Linux tools and Python to do stuff if needed. Sadly not markdown.