zlacker

I've been using this as a daily driver for at least 5 years now.

Only laptops so far, with 4+ cores and 32+GB RAM and 500G+ disk.

It was working fine on my Lenovo T470p, and it runs pretty sweet on Lenovo P14s. Except that suspend is not working. ( Hopefully is resolved soon ).

It's always a problem with battery, but with suspend working fine it's quite easy to get a solid 30 days uptime even though you move around. ~3h runtime with ~10 vms running.

I wouldn't say it's perfect, but I wouldn't choose anything else if I would do it all over. Totally worth the extreme learning curve ;-)

>>isodud+(OP)
Is it worth trying on a laptop with less RAM, like 8 or 16gb?

>>thinkm+0a
Yes, see the requirements: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/.

>>thinkm+0a
To make Firefox happy inside a VM it takes up about 2GB RAM. Dom0 eats up 1G RAM. sys-net, sys-firewall, sys-usb eats up another 1G RAM.

My collegue actually runs on 16G, but he has to consider memory when starting a VM, but it's doable.

You can run on 8G, but it wouldn't be a good daily driver. But maybe if you have a very specific purpose?

24G+ is comfortable. I'm currently at 48G and have 43G "mapped" to VMs. It's very easy to use a lot of RAM!

>>isodud+pd
You can drastically decrease the memory footprint if you use minimal templates: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal. But even with normal templates, one can run several VMs, and it's much more secure (and even convenient) than an ordinary OS.

>>isodud+pd
sys-net, sys-firewall and other administrative vms should slowly migrate to unikernels instead of running linux, which should help with ram usage. The mirage.io project seems to build a couple qubes vms, for example https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall is a firewall which they indicate to give 64Mb of ram.

edit: maybe i'm being a bit optimistic for sys-net, which is the vm hosting the driver for the network card: these drivers are included in the linux tree and would need to be extracted and packaged into an unikernel. But for every non-driver vm it "should be easy" to get an unikernel implementation (drivers for paravirtual devices are easy to write).

>>thinkm+0a
When I tried it 16GB was tight but doable. I would've preferred more, because I spent more time than I wanted micromanaging VM sizes.

>>isodud+(OP)
I may have to try this on my old T420 - will not be nearly as fast as your stuff but it does have 12GB of ram and a decent SSD. I have the dedicated Nvidia graphics card though which sounds like it may cause problems.....

>>isodud+(OP)
I used it on a 2013 i7 laptop some years ago successfully as my daily driver for a while by buying a couple extended capacity batteries and swapping them out when they were spent. Could get work done on the beach like that.

Now you can't find that kind of computer with swappable batteries anymore and I have work in 3D to do, I don't trust Intel anymore and try to buy AMD, so I'm stuck with windows haha how time have changed.

I'd buy another box capable of running this if I needed a VM lab type setup again. Very cool for that.

>>jamal-+fF
A Usb-c battery with 60W output would certainly extend a modern laptop even if it won't be able to fully supply the power requirment for a workstation-type laptop.

>>Melato+sC
I think that it would run fantastic, my Lenovo had dedicated Nvidia graphics and it worked like a charm. The AMD APU (Vega graphics) have been a horror show.

>>teruak+8d1
Nice tip I'm going to try that actually