Is anyone going to try to certify 4K laptops sometime soon?

I have been interested in Qubes for some time, but am generally not very enthused to work my way through hardware/kernel combination regressions while trying to work on something else. So something like a certified or, even better, laptop regularly used by developer(s) to work is preferred.

I notice that the Thinkpad X230 and some post-processed variants seem to be favored in this way, but one thing that leaves me hesitant is the low resolution of the screen: I spend a lot of time looking at text, and it’s good for that. I am wondering if this is something that might clear up in a year or two.

Currently, I use a Dell XPS 15.

Thank you, Qubes is a very interesting project.

Welcome to our community.

Are you a fix it your self kind of person?

https://medium.com/@n4ru/the-definitive-t430-modding-guide-3dff3f6a8e2e

You might look at what the NitroPad T430 has to offer, inquire on their website?

You might look through the posts of Sven, who uses a modded T430, and is knowledgeable in the T430.

I know very little, but I thought I would give you something to think on until someone more experienced, knowledgeable than myself comes along and warns you not to trust me.

Not particularly, though at some time in the past I’ve done those things. Partially because my interest for Qubes is for some use in business, so hacking up laptops one by one is not that appealing.

UHD XPS has been reported to be compatible with Qubes:

note that some have the following note:

Replaced Broadcom Wifi with Intel

You can probably use Qubes without to much problems on any standard laptop that supports required virtualization technologies. Things that should be taken in consideration are: it is better if keyboard and touchpad use internal ps2 and not usb (since enabling usb during boot is considered a threat, and sys-usb not working to stable for now - which may lead to situations when You are unable to login), support for AMD GPUs in Linux is better then for NVIDIA for now, if You don’t have SSD buy one since Qubes on HDD is really sluggish.

Other thing is Qubes is only one side of securing Your Laptop. It is great for defending You from malware and other remote attacks. Which is great but what is lacking is lack of mechanisms preventing physical attacks. There is LUKS encryption, AEM (if You install it) and not to much more for now. By using coreboot based systems You can improve Your security in that case with mechanisms included in Heads (Heads Threat model - Heads - Wiki) for example. By using coreboot based systems You are also able to remove many “black boxes” from the firmware. And here lays the main problem with Qubes preferred Laptops. They are mainly those machines on which You can easily run coreboot and this are mostly not so new ThinkPads.

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Notice that Certified Hardware, as it is appears on the Qubes website, requires that the producer of said hardware furnish two non-returnable pieces of the hardware and pay a fee, to the Qubes people, and wait.

Purism makes a 14 inch laptop that has Coreboot, and I am guessing, for several reasons they will not try to get their 14 laptop Certified. I should not explain things I know little about.

But if I had money, they do make a good effort to build a secure Laptop.

and a mini, which relies on USB, which as someone said, has problems in booting, and another potential security hazard.

and a good competitor.

Perhaps one or both the manufacturers has solved the boot problems.

Nitro sells refurbished laptops of an older Thinkpad, which, after being re-manufactured, is well trusted.

Notice that in any laptop, Qubes does not use all the available Cores or is hyperthreading of processors to avoid a Security problem. So using laptops can require patience.

While not good for a business today. I have looked at buying an older tower, or such that uses serial port modems and serial port keyboards to use at home, plugged into mains.

I am guessing when you say 4K, you meant screen size. I have no experience whether one can plug in 4K screen into some of these laptops. I think one of contributors, Sven said he use some kind of monitor with his T430, which he personally upgraded to be the same as the Certified T430 Laptop. But it is another potential Security hazard.

Thanks for the information, especially re: PS2 (it still exists?!) vs USB. I had a feeling that coreboot might have been a limiting factor here, but was not sure. Alas, looking at some of the other hardware integrators supporting it, even the otherwise modern System76 laptops top out at 1920x1080 from what I can see. Ditto Purism.

As for my interest in, even more so than certification, routine developer use: I’m tired of dealing with bugs like this, even with hardware that is Linuxy enough to have releases at fwupd.org (which is already a small list).

My main use case is being able to separate software development from other activities, as attacks via dependency management software is getting more frequent.

PS2 still exist in the internal connections, but internal USB is getting more and more popular. PS2 as an external port is really rare.

4K screens should work with Qubes, but I would not be surprised if there are performance problems, as Qubes OS only supports software rendering. Sadly, this is often considered a fallback path and not optimized. Firefox dropped its dedicated software renderer, and GTK’s Cairo renderer is deprecated. The replacement renderers wind up relying on software OpenGL, which is not efficient. I am not aware of any workarounds in the case of Firefox. GTK 4 software rendering performance can be improved by theming, but the themes that have good performance with software rendering are very flat and barebones. The increased rendering performance comes at the expense of ease of use for humans, especially non-technical users who dislike minimal UIs.

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