Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

qubes-os.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#81

Post by czk »

mikewarot wrote: post #76

Since it doesn't look like Genode is going to be ready to be a daily driver for a while, Qubes looks like something ALMOST capabilities based that I could live with. Some day I'll just be able to run stuff without worry.... but it's not going to be any time soon. Can I run old versions of stuff like MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 under it? Or my beloved Windows 2000? Windows 2000 with Office 2000 pro (with the patches to read…

you can with dosbox/pcem or something similar (dont think modern xen handles 16bit virtualization) -- but you can definitely run Windows 2000 in a VM on Qubes, but the windows tools are not supported on anything under 7

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#82

Post by pgaddict »

irundebian wrote: post #74
Dalewyn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4k To be pedantic, OP specified "HD" which is 720p. I gave him benefit of the doubt by saying "high resolution" in my reply, but I think 4K is unreasonable given the provided context. I'd wager 1080p ("Full HD") at most. There's also the question of frame rate, though we can probably safely assume either 29.976 or 59.952 fps since it's Youtube. As an aside, software decoding performance can vary pretty significantly…

Correction: I think I experienced noticeable stutters with Full HD videos not with HD videos.

I occasionally see stutters too, even with Full HD video. Or more precisely, mplayer complained about slowness and having to drop frames.

It often helped to actually give the VM more cores (not just the default 2), but sometimes it was due to some weirdo codec/quality setting, and recoding the video just solved it. Sometimes switching to vlc (from mplayer) helped. Other times it was simply due to the sys-usb vm being overloaded.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#83

Post by dublinben »

pgaddict wrote: post #78
orbital-decay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at least audio I imagine audio and other realtime loads having problems the most on a heavily virtualized system like this.

Not sure what "mpv" means in this context, but this reminds me the one actual pet peeve I have with Qubes - video/audio calls just don't work for me. It either doesn't work or the audio quality is really poor. I've tried all kinds of stuff, without much success. I'm using phone/tablet as a fallback, but it's not very convenient.

mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.[0]

https://mpv.io/

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#84

Post by Dalewyn »

irundebian wrote: post #73
Dalewyn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I'm using an Intel i7-8850H with 6 cores so I think it's powerful enough. It's not that I couldn't watch HD videos but I was experiencing stutters and it left me with the feeling that the CPU is insufficiently utilised.

I certainly rescind my insufficient CPU horsepower accusation in that case. I'm not entirely familiar with Qubes's innards, but the overhead it imposes must be substantial.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#85

Post by pgaddict »

dublinben wrote: post #83
pgaddict wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what "mpv" means in this context, but this reminds me the one actual pet peeve I have with Qubes - video/audio calls just don't work for me. It either doesn't work or the audio quality is really poor. I've tried all kinds of stuff, without much success. I'm using phone/tablet as a fallback, but it's not very convenient.

mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.[0] https://mpv.io/

Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#86

Post by pgaddict »

irundebian wrote: post #77
pgaddict wrote: post #52

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 a…

> scrolling web pages with large images is laggy Now that I've read this, I can also remember that I was also annoyed by jerks when scrolling web pages. I also found the backup management too complicated. I didn't want to back up entire VMs, just the data within the VMs. In principle, I would have had to start up all VMs for backups and run a backup script for each individual VM.

I only noticed the jerky scrolling on pages with a lot of images, particularly hires + CSS effects (blur etc.). Everything else feels OK to me (I'm sure it could be smoother, but it's not too bad so I haven't noticed).

For backups, I don't them the qubes way, I do "regular" backups within VM using rsync/duplicity/... When moving to a new machine I prefer to setup everything from scratch (and then restore the data). And it gives me all the features like incremental backups etc.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#87

Post by bobertlo »

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…

Yeah, I could not do it without other computers to use, but after a year of keeping a system running it, I find myself mostly using my other systems for specific purposes like a windows machine for gaming (no web browsing ever lol), my macbook air for printing, managing photos, doing stuff with my iOS devices, etc.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#88

Post by bobertlo »

tasn wrote: post #50

I've always wanted to switch to qubes, but it just feels so constraining. It's safer to never leave the house, but I don't want to live in a self imposed prison. On the other hand, the isolation provided by containers and flatpak is more accessible, but with a much larger attack vector. Maybe we need immutable OS + an audit layer on anything that could allow exploits to persist (bashrc and the likes).

I just really appreciate separating things like access credentials from things like web browsers without running multiple accounts. I do all my most and least secure activities on Qubes and use other computers for a lot of the other stuff in between.

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#89

Post by fsflover »

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…

> dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported

This is by design, to provide high security, which is the point of Qubes. It's planned to allow GPU for chosen, trusted VMs: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8552

Alternatively, you could perform a GPU passthrough, https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#can-i-run-applications-like-ga...

Re: Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

#90

Post by fsflover »

nullc wrote: post #59
zvmaz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What to use instead if one cares about privacy and security (what I call personal sovereignty)? It's a non-rhetorical question.

The only serious alternative to Qubes from a security perspective is to use multiple computers. That alternative presumably has better security, but also generally worse usability (particularly if you're going to be mobile! -- two laptops in your bag might be acceptable but comparable isolation would require more than two).

> That alternative presumably has better security

Not necessarily: https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#how-does-qubes-os-compare-to-u...

Post reply on HN