If your hardware is not a constraint and you have lots of RAM, you could also consider booting into a system with a /home partition based entirely in RAM.
You then get to choose what to persist to an offline encrypted disk.
@UncleIroh I'm running on 16GB, half of it going to a Windows 11 VM or an LLM.
Is it even possible to do that with a partition over 500Gb big?
> Is it even possible to do that with a partition over 500Gb big?
Theoretically, yes it's possible.
Practically, no. Not even close. The best desktop systems these days top out at 128Gb RAM and going more is prohibitively expensive.
You can keep the idea in your back pocket until the day comes when we have retail systems with 1TB+ RAM.
When we get to that point, holy shit, I'm going all in on entire RAM-based OS.
To clarify, Enterprise-level systems that are just massive banks of RAM-based SANs that can run anything you want have existed for years.
Those systems are used by banks, aerospace, etc.. but they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So yes, it's practically possible right now but definitely not for the likes of me. When we get retail systems with multi-terabyte RAM then we're talking.
Just think of the compile speeds ..
@UncleIroh Yeah I know some flavours of Puppy Linux run entirely on RAM, which may have its use-cases.
For programming purposes, an SSD has been enough for my needs.