Ahah, yeah nice way to think, I agree ^^ Even if IT, for me, is not always “I need this”, but “I want to test this” ! When you’re growing up, only the toys change, not the mentality ^^
Anyways, there are many reasons ! Some are related to my specific use case, some may be more general.
Specific to me :
- First and foremost, because I already have a dom0 host, and I want to try Qubes ! Also I don’t have another capable and powerful enough machine to run Qubes.
- As explained in this post (read only the 2 first §), my dom0 hosts domUs/services used by my local network.
- I can “port” Qubes functionalities into my system to render it more usable and secure, as well as learning new management tricks about Xen and systems management.
- Why not ? ^^ I like tinkering and discovering new things !
More genericly :
- people often try new OS in virtual machines, so I thought people could benefit from my tests. But ok, I admit Xen is not the typical hypervisor user choice !
- related, testing Qubes from Qubes may be useful to Qubes developpers and enthousiasts alike, to test new kernels, functionnalities, etc, without breaking the main install (even though not everything could be validated from a Qubes domU).
- I’ve read Qubes is thinking about the cloud (but if I understood correctly, not for dom0 rather the domUs), and some providers use Xen as their hypervisor, so it would allow to test/run a full Qubes dom0 there. Some users could use Tails/Whonix on local hardware to connect to a cloud-based Qubes dom0.
- testing nested virt provides the Xen project more information/debug about this experimental feature.
And this one is a mix of both reasons:
- Qubes is a “user oriented” system, so it makes sense to run it virtualized on a more “infrastructure oriented” system (like mine), even if I agree that it poses security risks that Qubes may not be able to handle (but should try to ?). Even if Qubes’ main goal looks to be the ultimate most secure OS (why not openBSD-based btw ?), it is already used by people who don’t care about EVERY security aspects of it. And to me having more users is a good thing for a distro, so the more use cases Qubes cover, the merrier ! With all due warnings of course.
There are maybe things I dont think of right now, but I guess it’s enough good reasons, no ?
Sorry long post, but you asked … ^^
PS to moderators: could our 2 last posts be split into another discussion in “General discussion” please ? It would be more relevant than here (User support 4.1) and I’d like to keep this post related to the technical aspects of it. Or move the whole conversation, and I’ll create new posts about it ? As you want, TIA !