Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

>>RafelM+(OP)
I tried using Qubes as a daily driver for a couple of weeks, and wrote up my experiences:

https://rillabs.org/posts/installing-qubes-os

Overall an impressive and surprisingly well functioning software, given what it does.

Unfortunately - which I didn't write in the post yet, should do - is that I felt I had to switch back to a normal distro again because of a combination of a couple of annoyances:

- The need to manually redirect the USB-keyboard to each qube

- The fact that I couldn't get Debian-based Qubes to respect the font size settings

- The overall relative slowness of the system, causing some already slow software to be even slower

- The last straw: Inability to run Virtualbox VMs in Qubes (which I use to create some course content etc).

>>samuel+ns
> The need to manually redirect the USB-keyboard to each qube

Why did you have to do this? In order to type in a qube? My usb keyboard just stays connected to the usb qube(sys-usb) and everything seems to work. I have never changed the qube my usb keyboard is connected to.

>>dmm+Xs
If the signals are going into sys-usb you must be piping them somewhere. For me and probably the GP, there's a "systray" (do they still call it that?) menu for connecting devices to things, and I have to direct my keyboard to a chosen VM that way (I have the added annoyance of having to re-set Dvorak each time; there's a bug somewhere). Maybe for you it's piping straight to dom0?

I recall at the beginning there was some security question you're asked related to this. Maybe you answered differently than us.

>>orbliv+zt
First off, the USB-thingy is indeed a configuration option. https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/usb-qubes/

Regarding the Dvorak: It's a PITA. I'm running Svorak A5 currently so the current procedure is:

* Make sure it's the default setting in each template

* Make sure it's the default in XFCE

* Run a cronjob in dom0, this make sure that newly connected USB keyboards are changed to the correct layout aswell.

  * * * * * DISPLAY=:0 ~/fix-scripts-xkb

  #!/bin/sh
  [ "$(setxkbmap -query | grep -oP '(?<=variant:    )[a-z]+')" == "svorak" ] || (   setxkbmap se svorak; echo fixed xkbmap  )

* XFCE login is STILL qwerty. This is a _long_ standing bug.

>>isodud+uN
Woah, I guess I've been logging into XFCE with the wrong password this whole time! heh.

zlacker