zlacker

If anyone here uses Qubes then I'd be interested in learning about your experience.

>>andyjo+(OP)
It runs smoothly and even provides convenient out-of-the-box backups on top. I'm mostly using browser, Skype, writing code. What else do you want to know?

Upd: Maybe this issue can help someone to evaluate current user interface problems: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1117

>>dandel+91
Any chance to run OpenGL-accelerated Steam games on it?

>>d33+B1
No

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/user-faq/#can-i-run-application...

Upd: But if you really want it... :)

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/54...

>>andyjo+(OP)
I'm using Qubes/Xfce for quite a long time (since R2, I think, so >2 years) on all my devices (T420s, Gigabyte BRIX workstation and a few other devices). I'm quite happy with how it works - it's a bit less convenient than regular distro, but that's due to the compartmentalization and thus expected.

The main inconvenience for me is probably having to use multiple keyboard shortcuts when copy-pasting between different VMs, but that should not happen very often anyway ;-)

I also have issues with shutting down the machines from time to time - it gets stuck in an infinite loop when disconnecting the LVM volumes or something. (Probably should have reported that to the devs long time ago, so I'll see if 3.2 fixes this and will report if not.)

Obviously, whether Qubes improve/solve your security problem is a complicated question and it depends on your threat model.

Update: Actually, I've just remembered another inconvenience - I haven't managed to install zfs (zfsonlinux) to get working inside VMs. It needs to install custom kernel modules, and the location is r/o by default. I've found some instructions on the mailinglist, but haven't managed to get it working.

>>dandel+02
A convenient and stable way to pass the gpu through, is a feature I am waiting for. It's on the Qubes 4.1 roadmap.

>>andyjo+(OP)
Qubes 3.1 running on a lenovo u330p laptop here.

The cons:

No OpenGL support outside of dom0. You can still watch videos, but that's about it. I do a little webgl coding now and again, so I got around this by installing firefox directly into dom0.

I've had some issues suspending to ram, when I suspend while plugged in, and resume while on battery power or vice versa. It'll sometimes take up to 5 minutes to resume, or never resume at all. It'll also sometimes hang on booting a couple times after not waking from a suspend. I've never tried hibernating.

Copying and pasting between vm's is kind of a pain. Each vm has its own clipboard, and you use a special keystroke to copy from one vm's clipboard to another. Which means four keystrokes to copy and paste.

It uses a lot of ram. My laptop has 8G and it can handle running 5 or 6 vm's pretty well (Normally you need at least 3, network, firewall, and user os) but if I'm running something with a lot of memory usage, it can't run low pretty quickly. I use an OS specifically for passwords which has no direct network connection. Also unless you want to combine the network os with it, you need a seperate os for handling usb devices.

Backup kind of sucks. It basically creates a tarball per os. I have some special scripts to use borgbackup to overcome this.

Drive partitions kind of suck as well. Before you can use a drive partition, you have to attach it to an os. Then, you can decrypt and mount it. And then, when your finished with, say, an external drive, you must umount it, unmap it, and detach. If you forget to detach before you unplug it, and you try and use another external drive, the system will won't let you reattach it.

The pros:

Each guest vm has a template vm that has all the software. This makes dealing with many different vm's a lot easier than if they were all separate. It saves a ton in disk space as well. I have 24 vm's and use only around 90 Gigabytes.

Having the ability to separate clipboard, keystrokes, files, etc. between different applications makes me feel much more secure. The standard linux setup where all applications running under one user are completely trusted to read/write each other's information is just crazy to me. I do a lot of development, and there are so many build procedures which entail downloading random stuff off the internet to link and build into code being run. I find this horribly insecure. (I did try running two X servers once as two different users, but for some reason the graphics driver couldn't deal with switching between them, besides which, qubes is much more convenient in this respect.)

Having the ability to keep an os offline is a very nice thing to have for managing passwords and other important data.

Networking between the vm's works great.

os updates are simple, can be done from the command line and the gui, which, btw, is pretty sophisticated.

Copying files between vm's is easy and well thought out.

Creating and deleting vm's is very easy as well.

For what it does, in general, the gui is designed very well.

--

Overall, I can live with the bugs, and am excited about the future of this project. It's helped me out a great deal with security (as far as I can tell, but who can really say anything absolute about security nowadays?), and does what it claims to do.

BTW, you'll have to accept running either Debian or Fedora on the guest vms to get all the disk space saving features. Although it can run any OS using a full virtualization mode, (including windows) I've only used paravirtualizations vms.

>>andyjo+(OP)
Also using Qubes on an old Lenovo Thinkpad.

The only major con for me is that it takes a lot of RAM.The laptop only has like 4GB so I can barely run my work and 'other work' VMs side by side. Often one will not boot due to memory constraints.

I think it would be fine on a 16GB laptop. I just can't be bothered upgrading that old hunk of junk.

I will bring Qubes over to my next laptop, if I ever do end up getting one. I find it indispensable for traveling - isolating network/proxy VMs from each other is amazing!

I'd also like to run i3 on it as the main WM. I think it is possible with some trickery but I didn't try.

>>reddyt+44
> No OpenGL support outside of dom0. You can still watch videos, but that's about it. I do a little webgl coding now and again, so I got around this by installing firefox directly into dom0.

Doesn't llvmpipe run? Of course, I guess that'd have vastly degraded performance...

>>d33+B1
In theory, if you have two GPUs you can assign one to your gaming-vm via PCI-passthrough and use the other GPU for the rest of your computer. Then you could either use different monitors for gaming and normal work or connect both GPUs via a hardware switch to the same monitor(s).

In practise there are some issues with the specifics (like the XEN version and patchset), so it's not a turnkey solution (yet).

As long as you are only playing casually: I vaguely remember a HN article about someone using steam's inbuilt streaming and running the games on AWS GPU spot instances, at a significantly cheaper price than building an equivalent gaming pc.

>>regeck+V4
Try djb's qubes manager instead of the default one https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/qubes-users/7-gm_q...

>>andyjo+(OP)
I tried Qubes for a while a year and a half ago but at the time it felt too much like a paradigm shift for me, and I didn't like the idea of running a redhat based dom0 with a lot of packages, it felt a little too much turn-key.

I then decided to try to put something together from scratch to understand it better, so I ended up rolling my own debian/virtualbox/pfSense/i3 environment, link in my profile to my blog describing how I set things up.

This of course is for sure NOT as secure as Qubes, but for basic browsing and development (no 3d/gaming) seems good enough for me, it also was fun putting it together and has been working fairly well over the year or so I have been running it.

This said I am glad Qubes development is ongoing and will likely look into running it again at some point.

>>andyjo+(OP)
I find it fairly laborious to launch and tear down zones, move files between them using a file browser integration. It multiplies the steps needed to do common things. It's not unusable by any means, but it makes you reconsider how much privacy you actually want. I still use it periodically, but it's a bit much even for me.

>>regeck+V4
Your laptop is very likely able to take 8GB (4+4). AFAIK every ThinkPad that takes 4GB takes 8GB, judging by what I read on the forums. X61/X200 do.

>>reddyt+44
borg-high-five

there's a borg community repo somewhere, if you want to share your qubes-scripts or a guide.

>>Torgo+gu
IMHO if you need to move stuff between appvms often, that suggests the compartments are inappropriate and you should rethink them.

>>regeck+V4
Definitely, memory is probably the most important resource when running Qubes. My T420s has 8GB and it's just enough, I wouldn't go for less than 16GB in the next laptop.

>>Torgo+gu
You're missing the point of compartmentalization. One typically doesn't want to contaminate zones, and if you're in the business of contamination, you are also in the business of multiplying the steps needed to ferry information between zones. The benefit of having single duty compartments like this is that you can focus on the task at hand, as humans are really awful at multitasking. Also see research on people driving whilst using a mobile phone: it impairs performance quite substantially and it's often dangerous to multitask.

Similarly on a computer, if I have all my apps in one place, all my bookmarks, all my personal data, all my contacts, etc, then this is dangerous because it's a single point of failure and malware often targets machines like this where it can see that the machine is used quite heavily by the operator and interesting things happen on it quite often. Not that malware is even the main culprit for collection. It could be just your spouse has a poke around your system for 5 minutes and collects 5 years worth of browsing history, or any other threat actor for that matter.