What are some little things you do, avoid, or know which you think others don't know, don't do yet, should know of, or just want to talk about?
For me, I check the drive physical and logical sector sizes, format to gpt whenever system can. Somehow luks over mbr causes the drive to still show up as "windows" on fdisk and it makes me not like mbr as a windows install might damage such partitions (or a host system where your drive is plugged into might tamper it).
If the drive supports 4096B physical sectors I set the partitioning tool to use not the usual 2048 sectors=1MiB but 4096 sectors=2MiB.
I also subtract 2MiB from the boot partition - let's say first partition = 510MiB so next partition starts perfectly aligned to sector - to perfectly align the other partitions which you should do too especially with SSD however your sector size and other parameters may vary.
https:// www.techpowerup.com /articles/other/157
After the partitioning is perfect, I use luks and format a partition aligned to physical sector (-b 4096). Some people tend to use defaults it's probably the reason why some people get negative performance with SSD.
>luks2 defaults to 512b, kdepartition and other tools default to 2048 sector, old file systems formats used to just align to 512b or otherwise