Hi,
I tried Cubes-OS first time about 5 years ago but just on a very low level due to performance reasons. Now I gave it a new chance and I am impressed. I like the basic idea of cubes (especially the isolation between basic OS and AppVMs), however I am not so much impressed by fedora and debian. My productive systems work on KDEneon and Endeavour OS (since Manjaro run into some trouble with my printer).
So I am looking for a way to customize Cubes-OS for my convenience. Actually, I am running it on fedora with KDE on my testing laptop (MS-Surface Pro 4).
I found the article Template build from a iso which leads into my direction. It would be great if there are some scripts to prepare the basic pre-requests and implement the ISO-content.
I also found the article Building a TemplateVM for a new OS.
I think the solution will be the merge of these two. To make it clear: I want to have a real template as a basis for AppVMs. As far as I understood, I can easily install any ISO into an HVM but that’s just like a virtualbox without proper isolation (within the ISO-OS).
Does anybody have tried this before? Any hints for me in advance? I do not want to re-invent the wheel or jump into a project that is known not to be working. However, I am willing to work on it (I had productive systems on basis of LSF and Gentoo).
No, it isn’t. (Although I don’t know what you mean by “within the ISO-OS”)
In many cases you would be reinventing the wheel.
For example, Endeavour is Arch, and there are already arch packages
and templates.
So you could treat this build as a flavor of Arch - arch+minimal+endeavour.
In the build scripts, replace the Arch repos with Endeavour repos,
install core packages and remove unnecessary Arch.
I posted more detail on this approach last year in a thread on Parrot
templates, I think.
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
I refer to this thread: There it is mentioned “… A StandaloneVM is similar with other VMs you may have used outside Qubes OS…” and from the further explanations on them main documentation about Standalone/HVM, I got that both do not support AppVMs on their basis (this is possible only with Template VMs).
But you are right - EndeavourOS is based on Arch as well as KDE neon is based on Ubuntu. However they have their individual flavor which makes them more convenient than the “originals”. Best example was my problem with Manjaro: It worked perfect for about 3 years with my brother MFC-J6520DW but suddenly (after an update) it could not print anymore in duplex-mode whereas EndeavourOS does without any problem. Both distros keep KDE versions up to date, whereas the “originals” stick on the (long term) stable repos.
