At install, I chose to make sys-usb disposable. I would like to see if sys-usb is made more stable by using a regular templateVM. Is there an easy way to achieve this? I don’t know salt at all, so I’ll need ELI5 instructions, if it comes to that.
Some background:
I have noticed erratic behavior from sys-usb. Gnome-disks crashes when I try to mount a drive. gnome-terminal crashes and renders further opening of X programs unable to connect to an X server. (cannot open display: :0).
The whole thing is just hinky. I can’t trust this unstable usb-qube to broker backups and restores.
I will read the script more closely, but I suppose what I’m looking for is a way to configure the salt state of my machine such that it does not create disposable USB qubes in the future. I figured this would be some sort of configuration…but maybe installation settings like this are not reversible post-install?
You can easily create your own AppVM using standard tools in Qube Manager, then attach your USB controllers to it (tab “Devices” in the qube Settings), and use it as your sys-usb. There is nothing special about sys-usb otherwise AFAIK.
You should be able to create a new AppVM from fedora-36 and add the USB controller(s) to it. Before starting it, make sure the other sys-usb is turned off otherwise your system may crash.
Creating an AppVM and adding the USB controllers to devices seems to be a little more stable than the disposable VM. But the VM still has some stability issues. Adding memory seems to help a little.
For example, quickly increasing/decreasing the font size in gnome-terminal can cause the app to crash, and then all subsequent X11 apps aren’t able to connect to the display. Overall, X apps are just unstable in this Qube. I had this issue (along with poor redraw performance) across all Qubes until I added a device entry in xorg.conf.d specific to Intel. No other Qubes, besides sys-usb, exhibit this issue now.