If the government wants to fabricate a reason to prosecute me they’ll just bring some drugs to my house, the idea that they would go in with the plan to plant incriminating files on my computer (instead of just lying that there were incriminating files / showing a completely fake computer???) and then be foiled by a fucking password box and go “damn, he’s too clever for us, I guess we have to let him go” is just BEYOND ridiculous
Nobody lives with you?
My grandmother, who has no interest in my computer.
Or visits you?
No
You don’t use a laptop ever?
No
What if someone does get through your locks?
What if someone guesses your password? Why don’t you keep your computer in a custom built safe bolted to the floor? There’s always another level of security you could hypothetically require, I just live in reality where the truth is no one is touching my computer.
there’s basically no downside to it.
It takes a second or so every time (sometimes a couple of seconds, I’m not always booting my computer with the intent to type shit immediately) which adds up over time. Sometimes I mistype, wasting 10+ seconds. And the benefit of this mild inconvenience is nothing.
I never used a password on Windows because I’ve never seen a reason for one. No one touches my computer. That’s what the physical locks on my doors are for.
I only use a password in Linux because it forces me to. The first thing I tried to do was disable it.
Cool, so they use any number of exploits to simply go around the password. The point isn’t that a password is easy to get through (just like a locked door isn’t easy to get through) it is that if you’re facing a determined attacker it doesn’t matter how secure it is. If they have physical unsupervised access to your PC, you’ve already lost.
Fortunately for us all, these determined attackers do not exist. Nobody’s breaking my windows to boot up my fucking PC. The situation in which a password would help you is if someone has gone to the effort to bypass the physical security on your home, and then has no plan to deal with a password locked computer. They just take one look at it and go “welp, that’s it, everybody crawl back through the window then, watch the glass shards” Instead of picking up the entire PC and walking off with it, or yanking out the hard drives, or booting into their own preferred OS on a USB, or whatever else would actually happen if these made up attackers were real.