Brain Fog! I want to install Qubes, I have some clues on what to do, but doe not know where to ask or start!

General Discussion
1

Hi.

I understand this is a high requirement hardware distribution
(which I fell in love with after seeing videos about it, but cannot yet install:
“Booting ver. 4.0.4 to ‘Try distr. before install’ shows some code then black screen.
Ver. 4.1.2 and ver. 4.2.0-rc5 only shows black screen”).

None of the above is the problem.

What I want to know/suggest is if there is a 1, 2, 3, … Steps that should be
done/followed for solving problems/before committing to this distribution?

0.A. If you want to use QUBES, This is Qubes, and this is:
0.A.1. What it does (Why use Qubes)
0.A.2. How it works
0.A.3. Benefits of what it does

If Qubes is for you, you can

1.B. Buy hardware supported by Qubes
1.B.2 Solution: “Link to buy!”

2.C. Install on your existing hardware.
2.C.1. Is your hardware on this list: Hardware compatibility list (HCL)
2.C.1.1 Yes.
2.C.1.2 Download.
2.C.1.3 User documentation / Downloading, installing, and upgrading Qubes
2.C.1.4 Forum Category for “install/boot” support

2.C.2. No
2.C.2.1 Check if your hardware meets the required specifications
(A link for how to)
2.C.2.1.1 Yes, it meets the requirements
2.C.2.1.2 Download.
2.C.2.1.3 User documentation / Downloading, installing, and upgrading Qubes
2.C.2.1.4 Forum Category for “Specifications are met, yet to be supported hardware”

2.C.2.2.1 No, it does not meet the requirements
2.C.2.2.1 Forum Category for “Specifications are NOT met, yet to be supported hardware”

New users (me or others), can say:
I am on: 2.C.2.
looking for 2.C.2.1 (which I am), and I am
looking for 2.C.2.1.4

Basically, a checklist that one has to fill in before posting a topic for support.
This, I think, would help the developers in giving them higher quality data, and
make them better see where problems often or might occur.

I’ve not been here for a long time, so I do not know what problems people often meet.
Therefore I do not know how what other checklists could be good to make.

Login issues:
after update, after installing a package, desktop environment, …
Boot issues:
… etc.

If this is something that makes sense, then the right people should see a repeating
trend that could be fixed with this method.

It is exhausting how much I must read before committing, and I am looking for
something simple, for the autistics. I think that I am writing this because some of the
topics I read did/does not have a “if you have a problem here, ask for help in this
forum Category”, and am rather left lost, wasting time, looking for people that have
had the same problem as me. Am OK with that, but I want to go somewhere where the same
problem had occurred.

Just thinking out loud, and thanks for reading :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Firstly, welcome to the forum.

Sorry to hear this wasn’t the best experience! That’s pretty much the User Support category. You can ask there anything Qubes related. We don’t have fine grained categories like you’re suggesting since the more we have the less people will find the right one. That is the purpose of tags (the things right next to the topic category).

You seem to have multiple issues. My suggestion is that instead of this big post you instead look for individual issues on the forum. If you don’t find them, then feel free to create a topic about it.

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This is sadly the reality of it. If you want to explore on your own and get your own hardware (instead of buying Qubes-certified computers or community-recommended).

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4

There are many devices out there that require learning before using them, Qubes OS is one of them :+1: , but with some dedication, you will be able to succeed with it.

However, if you don’t really need Qubes OS, that time may not be a worthy investment.

Please ask questions if you need, go easy with small steps, and it should go fine :slight_smile:

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If it makes you feel any better, let me tell you my story.

I had this old machine I was running Ubuntu with Virtual Box on. (I won’t go into why I found that unsatisfactory from a security standpoint; you probably already have a good idea.) So I bought another SSD, and planned to instal Qubes onto that SSD.

Complete failure. Booting to the thumb drive I had the Qubes ISO on, the system couldn’t see the SSD or any other drive connected to SATA.

I could install Qubes onto another thumbdrive and it would work (but VERRRRRY slowly), but no go on the SSD.

I took the SSD and ISO thumbdrive to another computer, removed its boot drive, and successfully installed there. I then took the SSD to the first machine and it sometimes worked, and sometimes didn’t.

I eventually realized that it only worked if I had the thumbdrive plugged in. The system boot would start booting off the SSD, but once that was loaded, the SSD became invisilbe again and it would actually run off the thumbdrive.

The good news is I was able to play with it enough to decide for certain that I wanted to use it, so I bought a much more powerful mini to install it on (one that wasn’t on the recommended hardware list, still), and…it wouldn’t install! (The mini wasn’t by any means a super-expensive top-of-the-line machine, but I also recognize even it might be beyond many people’s financial means–especially fully loaded with 64 GB RAM and one of the NVME SSDs.)

This time all I needed to do was download the absolute bleeding-edge test release of the system, and THAT worked.

I had a LOT of help from people here during those days.

Keep working on it, it will be worth it!

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Many people seem to have an aversion to such things to the extent that citing detailed legal statues (e.g., “Article 5, Section 42, paragraph 17, subparagraph 3 states…”) has become a humorous trope in fiction. My guess is that most people would just ignore this system and ask whatever they want to ask in plain language (and many of those who try to use it would probably end up citing the wrong code).

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