Crossed the Qubicon :-)

General Discussion
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Greetings all Qubers!

Just wanted to say hi to everyone as I have been using Qubes OS since a while now and I love it!

As I am pretty noob with linux, you should see me often asking questions around in the upcoming weeks and months as I’m trying to upgrade my Qubes OS system to the next level, adding more features to it.

Here is what I like the most:

  • Improved security of compartmentalization
  • Improved USABILITY of compartmentalization (God knows that I dreamed of that OS since years! How practical is it to split your private life from (multiple) professional life and different activites.
  • Disposable Qubes (Kudos to "View/Edit file in Disposable Qube!)
  • Whonix integration
  • Clone Qube in seconds (To test something before implementing it in main Qube)
  • Easy and comprehensive backup system

What I like less:

  • The quantities of “glitch” in the system make it difficult to use sometimes (Unclickable popup, microphone glitch (Still use windows for video calls) etc.

  • The poor compatibility with recent hardware (I have a dream, Laptop, 16 cores 32 threads, 64Gb RAM … :slight_smile:

  • While this is MY perfect OS, I understand that it is probably hard to “sell” and increase user base to pay for development.

What I’m looking forward to:

  • GPU acceleration.
  • Proper windows support.
  • More “out of the box” systems (Functionalities) like Whonix as an example
  • A bigger development team, with dedicated groups!

I want to thank the developers for their hard work and the community members for sharing all tips and tricks as I would never been able to have a functional Qubes OS system without your multiple posts.

With that said, it is obvious that I have crossed the Qubicon and there is no way back to windows as my main OS and I hope more and more people will also adopt it and that we find a way of properly financing this dream OS development :smiley:

Cheers!

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Hello,

welcome to the Qubes OS forum :wave:

What kind of issues do you have with your hardware?

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Thank you for this nice review! It looks in line with this topic.

I feel that my 6 cores and 64 GB RAM are quite sufficient for all my tasks. See this for recommended hardware.

A tiny nitpick: It’s qube, not Qube.

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Hi Solene,

As an example, I gave up installing Qubes OS on my previous laptop as it was not installing properly. So I tried different laptop from friends and colleagues and got a used one that I found was working. That was a lot of time and effort just to try a system at first.

While I’m aware of the HCL section, it is sometimes pretty hard to make sure we are talking about the same “variant” of a system that might have specific regional hardware.

I would also like to use a laptop that has a dragon range CPU (16 cores / 32 thread, no efficiency cores) but it’s still not compatible.

Definitly working for me as well with less than that for at least 3 “working” VM and that is great! As I’m looking to upgrade my system to the next level, I am looking at CPU intensive tasks VMs that would welcome more cpu cores.

By the way nothing to complain about, Qubes OS is so much fun already as it is :slight_smile:

Well noted for the qube!

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Did you try using Qubes OS 4.1 or 4.2 ? Hardware compatibility increased a lot with 4.2

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I seem to recall. Qubes is configured to only use one core, because of a possible exploit.

?? Or has the situation changed?

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This is not true, it is just Qubes OS that disables SMT by default. If a CPU has 8 cores and 16 threads, Qubes OS will only use 8 threads, 1 per core

SMT can be enabled, the security incidence of SMT depends on your threat model. My opinion on this is that most people should be able to use SMT safely. However it is disabled by default and if you enable it, it is disabled regularly at each kernel update…

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I did yes and I’m looking forward to Qubes OS 4.3 / XEN 4.19 to see if HW compatibility has improved again!

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