True. From a regular Fedora and occasional windows user
Office runs on it, games work on it, Thinkpad touchpad drivers aren't shit, Microsoft To Do is still better than anything anyone else has come up with, fractional scaling that works properly, power management that works properly, half decent recovery options, best corporate SSO and device management on the market, smoothest full disk encryption.
Hmmm, I just bought a Dell Precision laptop that had Bitlocker enabled by default (presumably by Dell) and at no point was I asked to record a backup key. I don't have a Microsoft account either. I'm probably screwed?
You can export the key to something else (and it's worth doing) personally I've gone for passing it to Microsoft (I'm not sure I could find whatever USB key I've stored it on otherwise). The option is under "Manage bitlocker" "backup your recovery key".
I've had bitlocker fail to find the key after doing a BIOS update where the TPM has been messed up (although usually it's just been disabled and needs re-enabling). If Microsoft has the backup key you can login on another PC or phone and get the key again (from memory it's around 25 random characters).
My threat model is theft of a PC not Microsoft one drive being hacked. Just means whoever steals the PC now has to either:
a) Hack the TPM
b) Hack my Microsoft account
c) Give up and reformat the PC before resale
While a & b are not impossible they seem unlikely for a random thief, while option c seems like the most likely response to a PC stolen with bitlocker enabled.
Bitlocker makes me less likely to be a victim of identity theft after having my PC stolen.
The best recovery option is the ability to snapshot a system and restore a computer or another computer to that exact state which has always been a thing even if implemented via rsync instead of zfs rollback/send. Gui installers offered a full disk encryption option when I started using Fedora 1.0.
If you want a pretty gui Timeshift seems to be a thing.
Power management in addition seems to work fine if the machine is properly supported. At least it seems to be as good on a thinkpad as on windows with more options via tlpui.
> Microsoft To Do is still better than anything anyone else has come up with
Not really. It started as Wunderlist minus half the features plus a useless “My Day” system. When did they add the “All Tasks” smart list? (It’s at least 2 years by my count, I don’t know the exact numbers.) How did they launch without it (it was in Wunderlist)?
> smoothest full disk encryption
macOS’ FileVault 2 is the smoothest, and it’s available to everyone. BitLocker works best with hardware not every computer has, and you need Windows 10 Pro or better.
Office runs on it, games work on it, Thinkpad touchpad drivers aren't shit, Microsoft To Do is still better than anything anyone else has come up with, fractional scaling that works properly, power management that works properly, half decent recovery options, best corporate SSO and device management on the market, smoothest full disk encryption.