Linux

Depends. On external drives yes. On internal boot drive no. I had performance issues and thermal issues with it so stopped on boot drives.

Only encrypt the home partition, for the root partition it just unnecessarily slows down the system.

Also, I think, there could be different approaches instead of encryption. AFAIK, android doesn't use encryption underneath, but uses a semi-closed bootloader (which means, if you install a different OS, all user data gets wiped). I'm currently investigating the feasibility of such an approach in the long term.

I made the mistake of not setting up encryption on my main 45TB zfs pool so I'm currently backing up everything on there to tape so I can recreate the pool (also need to change from mirrored to raidz) and then copying everything back to the drives. Although writing and reading each are around 6 days continuesly. Didn't want to bite the bullet and pay more then I absolutely had to and only got a LTO-4 drive and tapes.

All my important files are on a NAS, so if someone steals my laptop, there's nothing of value there without being able to log in and mount the remote file systems

Yeah all my drives are encrypted with LUKS mostly because of home burglaries (bad area and whatnot). I still keep backups regardless on drives that are also encrypted

I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used NO disk encryption.

Is the other half alright?

Because it requires generating, memorizing and entering a secure password. Because Linux typically doesn't support fingerprint readers or other biometrics.

No. I prefer the quickest way to share my data between different computers and operating systems on my home network. I will also mention that my network is not accessible over the internet.