There is a whole world of obsolete stuff nobody will ever do with a linux system anymore. Terminal servers with lots of serial terminals or modems for a BBS. Making a fax server, IVR, digital answering machine for analog land lines. Using removable optical or magnetic media. Recording broadcast tv. SCSI, Firewire. It is interesting to imagine what from today will be obsolete in a few years.
No but there is an ideological basis for free software though it is firmly based on practical experiences dealing with the consequences of close source devices.
Red Hat and Ubuntu are business. Debian and Arch are communities. Some of the smaller distros are basically that one guy in Nebraska.
People promote them for various reasons. An IBM employee will have different reasons to the supporter types who latch on to a distro and mascot like it was a football team. Now football, there is a religion. Its all ritual, nothing they do has any practical use, people congregate once a week and in some parts of the world it turns violent.
When the deb users start committing genocide on the rpm users I’ll call it a religion. Until then its just a bunch of anime convention fans arguing about their favourite isekai.
Most mobile/laptop devices should be encrypted by default. They are too prone to loss or theft. Even that isn’t sufficient with border crossings where you are probably better off wiping them or leaving them behind.
My desktop has no valuable data like crypto, sits in a locked and occupied house in a small rural community with relatively low crime (public healthcare, social security, aging population). I have no personal experience of property theft in over half a decade.
I encrypt secrets with a hardware key. They are only accessed as needed. This is a much more appropriate solution than whole disk encryptiom for my circumstances. Encrypting Linux packages and steam libraries doesn’t offer any practical benefit and unlocking my filesystem at login would not protect from network exfiltration which is a more realistic risk. It adds overhead.and another point of failure for no real benefit.