Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

I'm using Qubes OS as my primary for years - I think I started with the 2.0 release in 2014 (I might have tried/used the 1.0 release, I don't recall.) and I was immediately hooked.

I understand the usual story is that the goal is security benefits, and the compartmentalization (or rather the implied inconvenience) is the price for that. But for me the compartmentalization turned out to be a benefit on it's own, and actually convenient.

I find it extremely convenient to have multiple isolated / virtual workspaces for different stuff, even if you assume attackers / malice do not exist. Having separate VMs is not the same as having separate folders. I also love the VM templates, which allow me to do all kinds of experiments (e.g. install packages in the app VM, which disappear after restart). Or run VMs with a mix of distros/versions/... Yes, I could do some of that with plain VMs, but Qubes integrates that in a way that I find very convenient. The commands for copying stuff between VMs are muscle memory at this point.

Yes, there are limitations, like the lack of GPU acceleration. But movies in 1080p play just fine without it, and I'm not a gamer, so I don't mind much. I can't play with CUDA etc. on these QubesOS machines, and scrolling web pages with large images is laggy, but I find this to be an acceptable price.

I went through multiple laptops / workstations over the years, and the situation improved a lot I think. Initially I had to solve quite a few issues with installer, some hardware not working (or requiring setting something special), or poor battery life on the laptops. But after a while that mostly either went away, especially once I switched to laptops with official Linux support (Dell Precision were good, I'm on Thinkpad P1 G7 now). The battery life is pretty decent too (especially once I disabled HT in BIOS).

Is it perfect for everyone? No, certainly not. But it sure is great for me, and I hope they keep working on it.

>do you want a ≥5GHz multi-core CPU burning 150W just to watch a single video stream with maximum paranoia settings?

I mean, yes?

We're not talking about bloat here, you're deliberately imposing significant overhead load for a specific purpose.

You can't really subsequently complain about performance unless you bring sufficiently powerful hardware to compensate for that overhead.

I am a Qubes user for a couple years now, and I wish I'd switched to it years earlier.

Basically every criticism you hear is about correct-- principally worse graphics performance and battery life. But the performance issues for me were less bad than I expected, and the seamlessness of its usability was much much higher than I expected.

Like copy and paste, moving files between VMs, plugging usb devices into VMs, networking, etc. all pretty much just work. It's pretty impressive if you have any idea of the machinery under the hood needed to make that work.

And now I don't feel anywhere near as nervous that whatever vendor program I need to use to configure a device or browser zero day is going to compromise my system. I can read documents from adverse threat actor sources in a netless VM and feel reasonably confident that it can't phone home or steal my data, etc.

Obviously it doesn't replace real air gap security, but it's the closest thing you can get to a network of airgapped or firewalled per-application computers which you can fit into a laptop bag.

I also like that I can use software that really only works right on fedora/redhat along side software that really only works right on debian. (Or windows, for that matter, but it's not as seamless). I like that I can substantially upgrade my operating system while running--- like I went from fedora40 to 41 just by installing the template, and switching over appvms one at a time. If anything goes wrong it's trivial to roll back, and I can have some app vms that work fine on the new stuff while others are held back if there is a compatibility issue. I like that applications that go nuts and try to use all my memory only screw up the VM that they're in instead of my whole system.

It's so nice that when I want to get something working I can spin up a vm and scribble all over it until I get it working. Binary patch my libc, whatever. Then once I've solved it, I can apply the final clean solution to a persistent template. Any random experimentation just goes away when I close the appvm. Need some program just for a single thing? install it in the appvm rather than the template and it naturally is gone later. I can be intentional about changes being either ephemeral or persistent, and never have to worry that the removal of something temporary was incomplete.

Of course YMMV, -- if you're someone who is mostly doing text and low performance graphics and can run it on a fast computer then its costs will be small. If you'd find a ten year old computer perfectly usable chances are that qubes on a modern computer won't seem slow or poor battery lifed to you. Particularly if you have other computers for games, 3d gfx, full screen video, etc. If you are someone who has been subjected to targeted hacking attempts the increased peace of mind will be substantial.

> any reasonable CPU from the past 15 years can handle software decoding of high resolution video just fine.

4k VP9 from youtube takes my 5950x around 20-25% CPU usage to handle with hardware acceleration disabled.

The fastest consumer CPU available 15 years ago could not handle that. Hell, even CPUs from 10 years ago couldn't do that. Add power & thermal limitations of a laptop CPU? Not a chance.

And that's just VP9! HEVC or AV1 would really put the hurt on.

We wouldn't have to rely on security by hypervisor if linux had proper security measures, sandboxing and access controls OOTB. Qubes is still far from good although it's slowly getting there