FDE leaves very few if any opportunities for accidentally spilling cleartext secrets onto the disk. If by home encryption, I assume you mean some encrypted container (or encrypted document). Consider what you "DO" with the decrypted contents.. often you are copying them out to perform some action (authentication, etc).. Are you certain the apps you use and your clipboard won't be paged to disk temporarily? If secrets are in memory, then get paged to disk, is your swap encrypted? It is more likely you are still protected if using FDE (depends on your setup).

All that being said, thats a certain level of paranoia which i dont think is productive.. but perhaps for targets of the state or what have you, I'd rather not chance it.

I think in this case, "home" encryption is what I use. Most Linux systems when you install will offer to encrypt your home folder. When you login, your password unlocks a key which ecryptfs uses to virtually mount a directory filled with encrypted files to be your home directory. As long as you are logged in, the home directory contents are available (transparently). When you logout, the virtual mount is destroyed, leaving behind only the encrypted files.

To put it in perspective, if you were logged out completely and tried to login remotely, you would be forced to use a password login initially. If it was more like my desktop where I'm logged in and the screen in locked, the home folder is unlocked, so I can remotely ssh in using just my keys.

The default encryption on Ubuntu, if you select 'Encrypt my home folder' during setup, uses ecryptfs on your home folder, and cryptswap for swap. For some reason, /tmp/ isn't encrypted by default as far as I can tell.

AFAIK the main benefit is: if you want to run a multi-user or headless system, you need the network stack brought up before a password is entered - which home directory encryption provides and FDE can't.

> For some reason, /tmp/ isn't encrypted by default as far as I can tell.

It does not give any extra benefit because tmpfs only resides in RAM, and disk encryption typically only concerns data at rest.

If you come to a point where you want to have /tmp/ encrypted, you would rather encrypt the whole RAM. (Does anyone actually do that?)