When this happens, can you switch console (ctrl-alt-f1) or restart X (ctrl-alt-backspace) or can you ssh from another PC? you can also in a window have a journalctl or something tailing the logs and see if something is happening there

Do you have GRUB? If yes you can edit your kernel command line and append “init=/bin/bash”, see if at least this gives you a prompt, this has saved me a couple of time in the past. Else booting on a USB and mounting your boot partition may help to fix it.

BTW I also have LUKS and I’m using TPM, using tpm2-initramfs-tool, first, it failed because I forgot the tpm modules in initrd, but I always have 2 kernels installed and only modify one initrd at a time to have a safe boot if I have a problem, like I had!

I tested tpm2-initramfs-tool with proper tpm2 modules and it worked.

I also tested with clevis-initramfs and clevis-tpm2 and it’s even easier, no messing with crypttab.

Also, as long as you can break GRUB and append “init=/bin/bash” it is not secure of course, you can then prevent grub editing or not using grub at all.

I’m using baobab here, it scans my 500GB in a few seconds

https://apps.gnome.org/Baobab/

I’m an old coot and comes from preGUI area. My first unix experience were on 80x25 amber terminal. Then X came, I used mwm/twm/fvwm and things like this, it was very tricky to configure to your taste, mainly with config file, you wanted your xeyes, xload, xbiff, xclock etc at this place, transparent, no border, etc, very complicated. Linux didn’t exist.

Then Windows came… and kind of dominated the world with win3/95/98/etc. and at the time linux desktop were still not perfect + you had all kind of driver problems/missing.

As a lot of people I was used to windows GUI so I chose Xfce (also because France). Simple GUI, a button menu bottom left, an app bar, and systray icons and clock bottom right. Don’t need anything else.

I tried LFS, Arch, Cinnamon Mint, I tried Ubuntu, I tried tile, but nah, the simpler the better, Xfce it is.

I am using MX Linux for years now, Debian based, always up to date, .deb packages, no systemd, no snap, no flatpak.

I am using MX Linux (Debian based) and at install I chose FDE, just with the GUI it’s easy to have LUKS+btrfs, nothing special to do. Encryption is done by hardware, your CPU has AES instructions that can encode/decode gigabits/s and is not a bottleneck at all.

docker I guess, I still don’t know how it works, create them, etc