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Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

qubes-os.org

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Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#31

Post by Etherdrake »

irundebian wrote: post #3

Have used it for several months as my daily OS and dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT) and bad battery management. Due to software rendering the overall systems perfmance also dropped. So I cannot recommend it for people with high requirements on graphics and battery duration. Besides that it was an interesting and good exp…

QubesOS is best enjoyed with a hefty CPU, lots of SSD space and a multi-screen set-up (in my opinion). Have you tried using Freetube instead of Youtube? In my experience it works a little better.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#32

Post by mtreis86 »

behnamoh wrote: post #7

A simple screenshot of the OS environment would have been nice. But generally, I don't think people adopt operating systems just by seeing new recommendations on Hacker News or different forums. Most people have settled on macOS and then Linux and then Windows. and within the Linux ecosystem most people just use Ubuntu or Fedora and that's it. I don't see anyone using these other esoteric operating systems as a daily…

Qubes is a Linux OS. It's like if you took Fedora and installed xen on it and booted up some VMs and the windows for them opened within the base OS instead of in individual system windows. Plus some cool magic with the file system to reduce redundancy and how many times you have to update things.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#33

Post by zvmaz »

armSixtyFour wrote: post #27
zvmaz wrote: post #6

With zero-click exploits that we certainly do not know of, Qubes OS offers some peace of mind.

Unless there's a zero day in Xen in which case the entire security model falls apart. With all these cloud providers using Xen, I have no doubt that there's already one out there.

This is true. But the code base of Xen is significantly smaller than that of a full operating system running bare metal, so the likeliness of a zero-day comprising Qubes is less likely (but possible).

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#34

Post by accassar »

chefandy wrote: post #26
behnamoh wrote: post #7

A simple screenshot of the OS environment would have been nice. But generally, I don't think people adopt operating systems just by seeing new recommendations on Hacker News or different forums. Most people have settled on macOS and then Linux and then Windows. and within the Linux ecosystem most people just use Ubuntu or Fedora and that's it. I don't see anyone using these other esoteric operating systems as a daily…

I don’t think qubes is targeted at mainstream users— even mainstream developers— and I don’t think something has to be targeted at the mainstream to be interesting, especially here. There are probably a lot of people here that won’t ever use it that will still find the idea and ethos interesting.

Qubes is great as a development platform. The simple integration of VM's into a desktop is surprisingly useful and seamless for day to day development, testing and work.

I've used it for a number of years.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#35

Post by jwrallie »

irundebian wrote: post #3

Have used it for several months as my daily OS and dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT) and bad battery management. Due to software rendering the overall systems perfmance also dropped. So I cannot recommend it for people with high requirements on graphics and battery duration. Besides that it was an interesting and good exp…

I could tolerate no graphic acceleration and battery issues as part of the virtualization overhead, but I had issues with sleep (it would sleep and wake up perfectly only with when plugged in) and other related problems such as Windows VMs crashing when waking up from sleep.

I was using it well at home but could not stand it when I travelled around with my laptop.

I think Xen is mostly at fault for the issues, but I’m sure using something like KVM would be insecure, or they would have migrated already.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#37

Post by jwrallie »

Etherdrake wrote: post #31
irundebian wrote: post #3

Have used it for several months as my daily OS and dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT) and bad battery management. Due to software rendering the overall systems perfmance also dropped. So I cannot recommend it for people with high requirements on graphics and battery duration. Besides that it was an interesting and good exp…

QubesOS is best enjoyed with a hefty CPU, lots of SSD space and a multi-screen set-up (in my opinion). Have you tried using Freetube instead of Youtube? In my experience it works a little better.

The most annoying issue I had was that even using mpv would lead to audio samples being dropped. I think I fixed it eventually by increasing buffer sizes, but I would expect at least audio should work out of the box.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#38

Post by crest »

Dalewyn wrote: post #25
irundebian wrote: post #3

Have used it for several months as my daily OS and dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT) and bad battery management. Due to software rendering the overall systems perfmance also dropped. So I cannot recommend it for people with high requirements on graphics and battery duration. Besides that it was an interesting and good exp…

>bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT) It might help if you used a computer with CPU horsepower that actually exists. And in case this sounded facetious, any reasonable CPU from the past 15 years can handle software decoding of high resolution video just fine. This all said however, if you do actually need full use of all hardware resources then b…

You have to do more than just decode the the video stream to display it as smoothly playing video without dropping frames or audio samples or loosing sync. It requires always scheduling the context switches correctly between different virtual machines when using Qubes OS, performing multiple copies across protection domains.

Brute force helps a lot, but do you want a ≥5GHz multi-core CPU burning 150W just to watch a single video stream with maximum paranoia settings?

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#39

Post by woctordho »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

I would say, a little more hesitantly, that it deeply depends on what you are doing. When interacting remotely with untrusted services, apps, or documents, Qubes cannot be beaten. However, if I was afraid of my laptop getting attacked with an evil maid attack, I’m sticking with my Mac, Secure Boot, and FileVault; so that my Lock Screen is less likely to be patched against me. If I’m afraid of persistent malware, I wa…

In China we have ways to obfuscate those unusual traffic into usual ones like WeChat video calling

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#40

Post by accassar »

schoen wrote: post #12
behnamoh wrote: post #7

A simple screenshot of the OS environment would have been nice. But generally, I don't think people adopt operating systems just by seeing new recommendations on Hacker News or different forums. Most people have settled on macOS and then Linux and then Windows. and within the Linux ecosystem most people just use Ubuntu or Fedora and that's it. I don't see anyone using these other esoteric operating systems as a daily…

Qubes was created in 2012! It mostly runs Linux applications.

Runs Windows pretty well! I find that very convenient.

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/windows/

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