This is your Mac, right?
There will be a few things you’ll need to be aware of:
DEFINITIONS
Xen - The hypervisor that Qubes OS uses to allow it to run virtual machines
Broadcom - A company that makes hardware and notoriously HATES open source (basically nVIDIA, but for networking hardware)
Broadcom wifi cards in Apple hardware will likely not play nice with Xen
The Apple EFI Boot ROM (BIOS) likes to initialise EVERY component in your machine, including the wifi card (this is how Apple’s remote recovery can work). The EFI doesn’t seem to like to relinquish control over the Wifi card to anything other than MacOS (still haven’t figured out why….).
Linux boots on most Apple hardware by loading a barebones version of the mach_kernel that tells the EFI that it’s MacOS, and then it hands complete control over to the Linux kernel to complete the boot.
The problem with this is that the EFI might still hang onto the Wifi card.
Because of this, if you pass it through to sys-net, it will cause your entire machine to freeze.
Here is the workaround:
Your GPU is a Radeon, so resuming from sleep might not work properly
It’s a desktop, so this isn’t really as a much of a deal-breaker as it is if your machine was a laptop.
AMD have made a lot of progress fixing their drivers in the Linux kernel, but they still do some weird things when running through Xen, like locking up and causing your display server to crash, and you’ll basically have to hold the power button down and hard reboot.
The Initial Setup Wizard that runs on first boot after installing Qubes OS will likely freeze when “Setting Up Networking”
This is because of the Broadcom Wifi card. Explained in the first point.
Have a non-Apple USB keyboard handy. You’ll need it
Qubes OS 4.0.3 comes with kernel 4.19, which might be missing a lot of drivers and firmware for Apple hardware.
Have a USB keyboard handy
You’ll have to install the latest kernel by doing this:
Qubes Menu → Terminal Emulator (the second from the top)
Type in:
sudo qubes-dom0-update —enablerepo=qubes-dom0-current-testing kernel-latest kernel-latest-qubes-vm
After you reboot, you should be able to use all the hardware inside your machine properly.
Have your Qubes OS Install USB handy
You’ll probably need to boot from it several times to “rescue” your install if it freezes.
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If you run into any troubles, we’d be happy to help. Post them here and we will do our best to get Qubes OS up and running for you 