Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

I feel like there needs to be some way to explain the changes to Windows 11 as hostile from a longevity perspective with the ads and the lock-in.. With one-drive being activated and moving customer data to the cloud without consent, the LLM that gets in the way of the user experience, recall, ect. It would still be their choice but at least they would know what they were getting into..

I feel like id be doing some justice by letting customers who qualify (who don't have use-cases that Linux cannot handle) know that its a better experience because Microsoft is creating friction in the desktop experience now..

Other than that, FDE and Secure Boot are unrelated.

The board's UEFI will boot the EFI binary that is either your kernel + initramfs (UKI binary), or a bootloader of your choice that then boots your kernel + initramfs. Depending on your distro, you may have a bootloader like grub or systemd-boot that is already signed by the MS third-party CA and your board may already allow the third-party CA, in which case you don't need to generate and sign with your own keys. Otherwise generate your own keys, set up Secure Boot with them, and then figure out how to sign your UKI binary / bootloader binary with those keys.

This initramfs will then be responsible for locating and mounting your root etc partitions. For a systemd distro using the UAPI Discoverable Partitions spec (use a specific type ID for the root partition), systemd has a builtin cryptsetup target that will prompt you on tty to enter the LUKS password for that partition. Otherwise investigate your distro's initramfs options for doing that.

>* Dual-boot where I choose in BIOS/UEFI to go to either the existing Win10 drive or new Linux drive.

grub and systemd-boot both show menus to select one of the available EFI binaries to chain to. Otherwise your UEFI might give you a similar menu.

>* I want to be able to take my drive out of a dead computer and access it elsewhere if something goes wrong, as opposed to needing to reformat and reload from backups.

Any other PC can mount and decrypt the drive with cryptsetup just like your original PC could, as long as you specify the same password.

>* If I install a distro with secure-boot off, can I turn it on later for benefits, or vice-versa?

Yes. You will launch board's UEFI, set the SB status to "Setup mode", boot your OS, then generate and enroll new keys which will set the SB to "User mode" and start enforcing signatures on next boot. And if it breaks you can set it back to "Setup mode" in board's UEFI, boot the OS and troubleshoot / re-enroll keys. The OS wouldn't care that you had previously enabled SB but are now booting with SB disabled.

Note that Secure Boot != Measured Boot. With a standard Measured Boot setup the disk encryption key is protected by secure element on the board (eg TPM) measuring the boot chain, so your disk will automatically decrypt when the boot chain matches the previous measurement and automatically fail to decrypt when it doesn't match. Your concerns about failing to decrypt the disk apply to this setup, not to SB. But also LUKS-encrypted partitions can have multiple keys to unlock them, so you can have both a Measured Boot-guarded encryption key and an emergency fallback password to unlock the disk manually.

Linux - the kernel is GPL 2 - that means you can use it to your heart's content. If you make changes, it would be nice if you shared them, please do.

A Linux distro will generally have a similar license. Again the idea is that positive changes that you make are made available to everyone.

That is the idea of the GNU Public License: If you take our freely available stuff and add to it, you should make your changes public too.

Seems fair!