One of the most important parts of laptop security is disk encryption. It can help to save your personal data if you lost your computer or it was stolen. It’s impossible to encrypt everything. You need some code to ask for the password from the user and decrypt the system.
There are several options when you work with Ubuntu:
- encrypt only home directory;
- encrypt the operating system partition during the installation process and rely on UEFI Secure Boot for Linux kernel verification;
- encrypt not only the operating system partition, but also the boot partition; look at Full Disk Encryption Howto for more details.
It’s important to remember that disk encryption is not free. There is always a performance hit if you use full disk encryption, but it can be unnoticeable on modern hardware. There are some tests from Phoronix about disk encryption: