Creating a Kali Linux TemplateVM

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Just leaving a note here for future readers like myself. This guide worked for me in December 2025, but a few things were different.

Some notes:

  • qvm-template in dom0 is used to manage templates now. There’s also a GUI template manager under “Qubes Tools > Qubes Template Manager”
  • Right now the latest Debian template is debian-13
  • Debian’s current testing codename is “forky”, but the qubes repos don’t have that, so we use “trixie”
  • Thanks to finding it in this thread, there’s a different Kali signing key to install. Here is the Kali announcement on it, with info on downloading & verifying the key.
  • apt update/upgrade updates over 1000 packages, holding back 65 that don’t seem critical for me. It did not appear that there were any conflicting packages this time
  • I had to increase “system storage max size” for the template to 30GB to fully install the kali-linux-default package. I installed this package because I wanted common tools available without doing many manual template update → appvm restart steps.

Once I had the template I made an appvm and everything appears to be working fine!

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