How long did it take you to get used to Qubes?

[anon84660062]

Two weeks.

[dkzkz]

2-3 days but the first time i installed Qubes i didn’t understand how to install software and update template so i put sys-firewall as network for template

Qubes dev need to put a warning at the first boot about this

[parulin]

When switching to Qubes OS:

• my threat model was pretty simple after having been way more complicated
• I was using Debian-based distros for many years
• I had to wait for better hardware to be able to use it (so, like @GWeck I had time to read things about Qubes OS)
• I was barely using my computer, maybe once a week
• I was mostly doing basic things: web browsing, file transfers, text edition, backups…

So it was quite smooth, I used a standalone to switch more quickly, even if it was inefficient. Compared to the previous situation, it was still better. So, since that time (2 or 3 years ago?), I’ve been peacefully learning things one after another.

There is a lot to learn, but it seems to me that your feeling might be more related to the security considerations than the OS itself? One important word here is “reasonably” (secure).

@TheGardner

You have to read - not to play with it to find out and understand - especially the OS basics.

I would advocate for the opposite view Unless you do something in dom0, it was easier for me to play with qubes than to try to understand the docs.

[tokaso80]

Coming from Arch linux made my experience far less troublesome it seems

Tails is way better for anti-forensics capabilities oob. But it’s not something to use long term for daily driving

[Paprika]

Probably a month or so. Now, I’m not even comfortable to use any other system and many things will have to wait until I get to my computer, be it email, online shopping, web search, etc. And I’m not even a person who has much to hide.

[rowanwright]

The transition from Linux to Qubes as a daily driver was pretty smooth. Qubes is actually marginally easier than maintaining a Linux system as a daily driver because any broken software or configuration issues are isolated to templates that I can easily replace.

There are a lot of home linux users who distrohop or reinstall if they get any serious system issues to save time. I doubt many Qubes users have that issue.

[reseterror]

roughly two to three hours. but modifying the system was not as easy, took me a few days.

[shantyspruce]

There’s a major component here worth noting when coming from Mac/Windows: with proprietary software, you’re given a box and buttons, and all you need to know is what buttons to press. If you run into a problem with the box, it’s their problem, and the (m/b)illions of people using it will tell them to fix it. Most will never even know it was broken before it happens.

But with F(L)OSS, you’re given an entire machine and you have to learn how to maintain, because there’s a small team with contributors and a few hundred thousand using it for a popular distro (Qubes has ~40,000 users). So you have to know how to oil the machine and how to report problems you encounter yourself. It may not be fixed in beta where someone like M$ would have the people to test every conceivable use case.

Add to it that Qubes isn’t anything like a regular OS (and in fact, technically isn’t an OS at all*), and it can be confusing at first. Qubes functions fundamentally differently than monolithic OSes, with having everything separated into security domains, and you have to not only re-learn different buttons, but an entirely different box.

All that sounds complicated. It’s actually not so much that Qubes is hard to learn, it’s that you need the right expectations. If you expect Windows, it’s going to be a terrible experience. If you understand that new games have new rules, it’s actually quite easy.

[trapezoid]

Transitioning from heavily customized and hardened Debian it was a relief to switch to Qubes OS. Over period of a few weeks i got fully used to Qubes and specialized templates configured.

[user10]

@tnt

I also have to say that, because of how I am, I MUST configure my VMs to speed up my daily tasks. If I feel slow and/or doing tons of extra steps to carry on the tasks that I did previously in my last OS (macOS), I will end up surrendering and going back.
So, I have been configuring my machine since then, and, although sometimes it tires me up so much because I still have a lot of things to be done, I then remember how it was working and living a month and half ago in macOS and now I notice all the UX upgrades I have set up.
I no longer worry about having my Parallels VMs dirty because of the TemplateVMs. I can do things faster than when I was a macOS user.

Please, can you expand on this?! Ease of use/speed/performance is one of the major blocks for me in using Qubes, and I imagine many users, and I’d really appreciate it deeply if you could share insights or configurations.

[tnt]

I have setup i3wm instead of XFCE because XFCE is a pain in the ass. For example, a notification will steal the focus of the active window. This means if you had the qubes os app menu opened (the one at the upper left corner of the desktop) and a notification pops up, you will have to reopen everything again.

I’ve setup a custom notification daemon for i3wm called dunst so i can see the volume level in a progress bar with a beep sound any time i change it using the keys, to improve my UX.

Also, I’ve setup this notifications to show a thumbnail of each screenshot I take, so I know what aspect has the screenshot i made. This notification is also clickable and, on click, opens up a rofi menu that lets you select to which qube are you sending this screenshot. This will send the screenshot to that qube and also copy it to the clipboard of that qube, so, if you need to share screenshots with your colleagues at work, this will speed you up instead of having you to open a terminal in dom0 to qvm-copy-to-vm your photo to that qube, etc…

I’ve also set up a rofi menu, with the panel customized, to emulate the behaviour of the original XFCE app menu panel located at the upper left corner of the screen. This shows me app vms, disposable vms, service vms, template vms, dom0 applications, a power menu to reboot/turn off/lock the computer, etc… active machines appear in bold text with also a coloured icon of the qube so everything feels intuitive.

I’ve set an autostart config for my VPN app vm, and that way it starts proton as soon as the computer is powered on.

etc…
The setup mainly consists in:

• Get mad at something that:
  • Requires a lot of steps: screenshot transfer
  • Feels like a burden to suffer: xfce notifications stealing focus
  • Repetitive task: opening ProtonVPN each time I power on the PC
  • Could be nicer to use: XFCE with no dynamic tiling window manager vs i3 which is more comfortable once you get used to the keybinds
• Once you identify what makes you mad, start scripting the solution using available tools (so you do not waste much time coding).

This obviously requires effort because you are now customizing your system (aka: ricing your linux), but at long term, if you invest 2 weeks or so fixing every issue, your machine will crazy good in a future.
I even made my desktop look like what would be a stereotypical hacker of an action movie be using hahahah. Take a look: