LUKS encrypts the whole drive, native FS encryption can encrypt it partially (e.g. just the home partition). Additionally, decrypting without a keyboard is a pain or impossible (e.g. touch screen only devices).
If the home/root partition is a physical or logical volume you most certainly can leave that decrypted while encrypting other volumes. The system could not boot if that were the case as the efi partition cannot be encrypted.
I’m the furthest thing from an expert in linux encryption, but can you not use KDE’s “Vaults” feature to create encrypted folders/drives? I think it uses “CryFS” as the backend (according to KDE. Don’t really know enough about it).
I’ve used them on my btrfs drive and seemed to work fine.
The boot order of the component which handle encryption has an effect on which other system components which reliably can be scripted to automate stuff with that data.
Tldr if it’s just for your documents, sure. If you’ve got sensitive program data / config there, it makes it harder to autostart them because now you have to wait.
LUKS encrypts the whole drive, native FS encryption can encrypt it partially (e.g. just the home partition). Additionally, decrypting without a keyboard is a pain or impossible (e.g. touch screen only devices).
Opensuse has full disk encryption. https://news.opensuse.org/2025/02/20/setup-fde-on-opensuse/
If the home/root partition is a physical or logical volume you most certainly can leave that decrypted while encrypting other volumes. The system could not boot if that were the case as the efi partition cannot be encrypted.
PostmarkedOS was able to encrypt disk while offering on screen touch keyboard to unlock it on my pinePhone “pro”.
It does this by encrypting the OS separately from apps and user data. The OS is auto unlocked (usually using a hardware TPM chip).
I’m the furthest thing from an expert in linux encryption, but can you not use KDE’s “Vaults” feature to create encrypted folders/drives? I think it uses “CryFS” as the backend (according to KDE. Don’t really know enough about it).
I’ve used them on my btrfs drive and seemed to work fine.
The boot order of the component which handle encryption has an effect on which other system components which reliably can be scripted to automate stuff with that data.
Tldr if it’s just for your documents, sure. If you’ve got sensitive program data / config there, it makes it harder to autostart them because now you have to wait.