With Bullseye/Chimaera it took two months, which is the fastest it has been (presumably due to continued automation of previously manual tasks).

Assuming the effort required is equivalent between Bullseye and Bookworm, is there a reason to expect Daedalus before August?

If your problem is that the system runs slowly then start by trying to fix that *without* disabling FDE.

A few questions to start with:
What sort of system is it? (Desktop or Laptop, make model, etc?)
What CPU has it got?
How much memory has it?
What is it's display? (Could you add a GPU if it hasn't got one?)
What is running on it? (OS, desktop env, etc?)
Is it using swap space very often? (If yes then adding memory might speed it up a lot.)

Try running top and vmstat to see if they say anything interesting.

Hopefully answering that lot will point you towards a fix.

Firstly, an attacker with physical access doesn't need viruses. (A virus is only one type of malware; they may or not use other malware.)

Second, rationalizing that a "normal user" wouldn't look in system folders is the wrong attitude - if that's the limit of your threat level, a simple password would be enough. (Similarly "advanced attacker" or "common attacker" don't mean much - anyone capable of producing a Live USB is already sufficiently advanced to be a potential concern. What matters more is motivation and opportunity.)

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Theoretically, a determined adversary with enough time and money can break or bypass any security measures you put in place.

You want "enough" to be sufficiently higher than is available to those who want to access your data - which brings it back to the question of who you're trying to be safe from. Why is someone after your data? What opportunities do they have? Do they care about being detected?

If you can't define the threat, how do you know when you've done enough? Security is always a trade-off against usability, so you've got to decide where to draw the line.

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Your original concern referenced performance, but I'm guessing you don't have the fastest machine available, so it will always be running "slower than it could be" - that isn't a meaningful metric.

If it's too slow that is when you first decide if you can upgrade hardware to resolve that, or if you can install more efficient software, or change the configuration of existing software, etc. If none of that helps, then decide whether the security gained by encryption is worth the cost in reduced usability.

ralph.ronnquist wrote:

No I meant to mount an overlay of your current OS, and then install in the overlay.

In that way your lower / installation is unaffected by whatever the inscape installation from daedalus pulls in.

EDIT: change "upper" to "lower" (as it should be)

Oh, I get it now, sorry, yes that would indeed work, and be a bit less effort. This looks like a nice hack for future use.

Meanwhile, I was first trying pdfarrange - which kind of does work, except it is rather crude, and seems to only allow splitting a page vertically in the middle.
Then I saved the document as EPS and tried the original poster (which I guess pdfposter is supposed to imitate or at least is inspired from, but poster only works with EPS). This actually worked perfectly.

poster -mA4 -s1  calypso_path.eps >poster-calypso.eps

yields a file of A4 pages with nice margins and cut marks, just what I needed. I suspect that must have been the same tool I used decades ago.  Now I just need to uninstall pdfposter, PosteRazor and pdfarrange, and remember to never install them again...