I'm looking for a new distribution for my desktop. It has to have security updates. And can have LUKS and LVM from the begining. So far there seems to be none.

I'm done trying distributions. Can you help me? Do you know anything that works? Even those that do work with LUKS and LVM, are unable to use existing configuration and it's a must to repartition the whole thing for each install.

Here's part of my story so far.

Fedora I like. And it just works. Only that is rpm based and rpms have some problems that deb distributions don't. And it upgrades way too often.

Than I have tried CentOS, and that is rather dated. Sure, they are made for production servers and not about having that new functions in that graphic app.

Debian 6 works well. But it's also dated. And it's a pain in the behind to get the graphics going with 3D acceleration.

Ubuntu I don't touch because of the privacy issues.

Porteus is wonderful! Real fast. And it works well. Never got to install it as it never worked to use any of the downloaded packages.

Back to Debian. Debian 7. Debian 7.1. Debian 7.2. All lock mysteriously in the first 10 to 20 minutes of usage. It also happened with Tails 18 or 19. Only on my computer. On others things were fine. Tails 20 and 21 has no issues. But they also upgraded from Kernel 3.2.x to 3.10.x.

Debian Testing means upgrading as often and as much as Fedora, but without the security updates from Debian stable or Fedora.

KWheezy 1.3 works well with Live. But the installer is handicapped. LUKS is beyond their partition manager. Weird, as LUKS encrypted drives do work with KWheezy.

Tried Trisquel and gNewSense. Both very nice in principle. They never get to boot because of the installed hardware. It's my fault. But now that I have it, I would not just dump working hardware.

Linux Mint 15 is rather big. But it looks good. And it functions well. LUKS is beyond what the installer can do.

I'd stick with Fedora, if I were you. You don't have to get all those updates that break things: "yum --security update" will get you the vital things. As for the new versions, you don't have to re-install: Fedora has always been good at upgrading from old versions.

As you can see, I use CentOS. I've never understood this urge to get the latest version of everything: I just want something utterly reliable that I can install and forget for a few years. But that's me, not you.

I was using Fedora KDE spin without any issues. Currently I am using Debian-LXDE but will be going back to Fedora KDE in, I hope, in a few days. Wheezy is Debian's stable branch. So maybe choosing a different Debian with LxDE, Mate, Cinnamon or XFCE would help with the freezing part. I have no issues with Debian LXDE freezing on this old computer, so maybe the issue with you had to do with Gnome 3 rather than Debian? I only use the command line and yum to install or upgrade. In Debian I use the command line and aptitude or apt-get. Between those two I really don't see a huge difference other than a couple of commands worded differently. Man pages help a lot with that.

You probably know this already.
For any Fedora spin - Get postinstallerf from sourceforge. It will also add the correct rpmfusion repos.
For Debian, with whatever desktop, get the repos from deb-multimedia.org

Both will add what Debian and Fedora leave out. The non-free stuff.

I know you where looking for other choices. Between those two they should work with anything, they are also my favorite's. Plus they have the encryption options you want as you already know.

Yes. Fedora it is. And it works smooth. I was blown away when I found Fedora 19 can actually reuse my partition table (LVM over LUKS). Everything I have tried before, including old Fedoras could not and wanted to redo the whole thing.

A couple of times I was the wise a*s and got stuck with the rpm. I have yet to be stuck with the dependencies with an apt-get distribution. That's all.

I also liked how Fedora 19 does not push for an early upgrade. I know it's about time for the next release so there are many updates. But for a 800MB download the update (security and the rest) was over 550MB. Some distros push for an upgrade before the first reboot.

I used to have the urge to have the latest, the (assumed) best. Today I agree with you. And I want to keep downloads to a minimum as my regular line is over 3G. Only that I like Gnome3 and CentOS still goes with Gnome2. I also do graphics. And I badly want the soon to come Gimp with more bits per color than ever. That's about everything I can think of right now.

I have a feeling the freeze has something to do with the kernel. But I don't have the knowledge to locate the problem. Gnome3 works well. But the freeze was there in an older Tails which is based on Debian 6, and uses Gnome2.

Well, that's what I get for being cheap! Supermarket junk with a very big screen. The Wifi works in Linux at about 2/3rds of the power in Windows. And the power consumption is about 2/3rds in Windows compared with Fedora/Debian. Can't suspend to memory. Can't hybernate. When I bought it the video card needed the proprietary drivers. Next time I'll be more careful. Even if the power consumption is higher and the screen is smaller, at least it should have all functions working.

Anyway, the choice is Fedora19. And just upgrading for the security.