zlacker

Is it worth trying on a laptop with less RAM, like 8 or 16gb?

>>thinkm+(OP)
Yes, see the requirements: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/.

>>thinkm+(OP)
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+p3
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+p3
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+(OP)
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.