Slackware taught me appreciation for apt/yum dependency resolution.

It was a great learning experience, but I doubt I’d ever go back

Never actually tried LFS but I have done Gentoo from stage 1 (back when that was an option), so I’m going to use your statement as an indication I can skip LFS 😁

So if you want to use systemd-boot as the bootloader you have to (apparently) install the systemd-utils package. Or you can just use GRUB / efistub.

An obviously talented programmer is no longer working on a free project that very few people can meaningfully contribute to - that is a shame.

I can’t even get myself to learn rust, let alone make a GPU driver while reverse engineering blackbox hardware.

But how to get the OS to recognize it?

My approach for doing this in Gentoo with an encrypted /home is to configure dracut to make a slightly customized initrd.

Thanks to dracut modules, not too much configuration is needed - it prompts on boot for the password to decrypt, and then fstab is just configured to mount the decrypted uuid.

Someone else mentioned using multiple key slots, but I think this is your only real secure option.