Is it possible for QubesOS to not feel choppy, like you're not using a virtual machine?

User Support General
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I’ve used QubesOS experimentally a bunch of times since as far back as 2019. Never found an ongoing use case for it. But I’ve always liked the way its designed.

On every system I have used it on, it has been choppy at best, and every time I upgrade a component, whether its the SSD or RAM, I haven’t really felt an improvement. By choppiness I just mean a slight delay that I don’t experience on a different OS. Not just from opening qubes (that’s part of it, but some delay is expected there), more so from using apps.

Most recently I am trying Qubes on an Intel NUC i5 1135G7, something I’ve used it on in the past, but now using 32GB RAM and an SK Hynix P41 2TB drive. I really don’t think the choppiness is coming from either of those. I’m guessing its the CPU or graphics, neither of which are amazing by today’s standards, but they weren’t amazing when I bought the NUC years ago either.

A lot of people use Qubes on Thinkpads, and some of them are on the HCL. I own a thinkpad T570, CPU is an i7 6600U. I think some people would consider this perfectly acceptable, but not for me, even if it is technically more secure for various reasons.

Basically, I want to use Qubes long term but the choppiness has been a turn off, and I can’t quite figure out what minimum specs are needed for it to not feel choppy, or where the bottleneck is coming from, if any.

In the mean time, I’m testing Qubes on a custom gaming PC, which isn’t my intended system for Qubes but I am curious to see how well it runs on what I assume is way beyond the recommended specs (AMD R5 7600, 9070 XT, DDR5 6000MHz 32GB, Samsung 990 2TB).

Is some choppiness par for the course with Qubes?

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It really depends. If your specs are older (like a 6th gen i7), then you can expect choppiness in pretty much every situation. On newer hardware, like the 1st gen Ultra processors with 32/64G of RAM you’ll only see occassional choppiness when apps try (and fail) to use hardware acceleration. For me this manifests in:

  1. Online videos (some sites work without problems, some don’t. There’s decent workarounds, though)
  2. Websites very heavy on GFX
  3. Games (but this is solvable by GPU passthrough)

Other than that it’s quite smooth for me, it doesn’t really feel like using VMs (at 60Hz at least, I’d expect higher-refresh-rate monitors to struggle more).

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@Atrate

Here’s an example. I open Preferences in Nautilus file manager, the preferences window opens almost in slow motion.

I can’t really test videos at the moment cause of Qube <qube> has failed to start: 'UnknownDevice' object has no attribute 'libvirt_name'

Sounds like a graphics issue. My CPU has integrated graphics, I can’t tell whether the qube is running with my integrated graphics or my dedicated graphics. Is there a way of checking? I tried connecting my GPU to my fedora template VM in Devices, ran the VM and my pc crashed.

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Edit

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Hmm.

I’m not trying to game. It lags on simple things like I mentioned earlier, opening Preferences in Nautilus in Fedora template VM is just one example, and that’s on my gaming PC which uses a Ryzen 5 7600 CPU.

I don’t understand how changing anything in the bios will affect what GPU Qubes chooses for its VMs. Given that my PC crashed when connecting my GPU to my fedora template VM, that must mean it defaults to integrated graphics for probably everything.

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Unsolvable. This video will not be played smoothly on any CPU in Qubes OS:

The problem is in Xen/Qubes OS rendering approach. It does not depend on CPU that much.

But in R4.3 (fedora-40+ templates) there is a major bug - video playback is choppy in Firefox.
To wordaround this bug you can install Firefox from flatpak, the video playback would be much-much smoother.

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@balko

I see. That explains a lot. For playing a 4k video, does GPU matter more than CPU? Or would this not matter a whole lot given the bottleneck is the “rendering” system itself?

If some choppiness is to be expected then I kind of feel better about using modest hardware.

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No offense here, but I can’t even imagine what kind on choppiness you talking about…
and I’m using Qubes from the very first RC release, and had a lot of different hardware over the ages.

Might be I’m just get used to it, and not noticing something obvious?! :slight_smile:

However, I do have a high end gaming PC with windows, and Ubuntu so I think I would see the difference if there would be any.

Video playback in a brower is a different story, for sure. So I would really need to see an example video(?) about general use to understand the issue.

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After a while you get used to it, but when jumping back on a traditional system, that thing seems so smooth and responsive compared to qubes os :sweat_smile:

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Yes, probably you are not noticing.

I also follow Qubes OS from R1 beta or something, and never saw a version nor hardware that would have as smooth video playback as GNU+Linux has.

To check you hardware: Open youtube video I provided above fullscreen and watch it whole, especially pay attention to panning scenes.. It will micro-lag and jump at some moments. Tell us the result, please.

The problem happens even on 1080p, not 4K, so it’s not related to CPU power limitation.

  • GPU does not matter at all. Even weak internal GPU would not be a bottleneck for anything.
  • CPU does matter if you play high res videos, like 4K, 8K, as it has to be good enough for real-time decoding. Modern Thinkpads have CPU that manages 4K on avg bitrate. Old Thinkpads can struggle even with 1080p.
  • No matter what CPU and GPU you have, you still will have micro-lags that I mentioned. But those are easy to live with, some people do not notice them, especially after some years of using Xen/Qubes OS rendering.
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I must be used to it. I rarely use a traditional system, and I dont view
videos at high resolution. My hardware is quite old, and I dont really
have issues at all.
I do find that a screenreader will get choppy at times, but the same on
a “traditional system” under load. Qubes interactions seem fine to me.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.

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Just tested video playback. Brave from flatpak fullscreen was smooth all the way to 1440p. 4K was a little bit choppy. Usually I watch 1080p, though. That means daily.

However, the video needs to be fullscreen. If there are any window frames visible at all, the video is choppy even on 1080p. Also, I just started looking and noticed the Qubes menu is a bit choppy and moving windows around feels a little bit choppy and the blue ghosting in the Q-menu bugs out sometimes. I have previously noticed that the mouse left click registers sometimes to a lagged mouse position or something. So I guess there are some bottlenecks here and there. I’m still on 4.2.4.

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Are you sure 1080p with this video is 100% smooth in Brave for you?
Can you please record 60fps video of such 1080p flawless playback and share? Because it sounds unbelievable, and most probably you do not understand the issues I was talking.

Do you have wireless mouse?

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Are you sure 1080p with this video is 100% smooth in Brave for you?
Can you please record 60fps video of such 1080p flawless playback and share? Because it sounds unbelievable, and most probably you do not understand the issues I was talking.

To me it is 100 percent smooth. But maybe I don’t understand the issue. I don’t have capture card for recording the screen.

Do you have wireless mouse?

Yes

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I mean to record with mobile phone.
Recording via capture card may not show the proper results, because it’s a rendering problem.

WiFi router can affect it on load. At least it happens with logitech dongles.

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This is too much trouble. I’m sorry.

Could be. But I think it could be Qubes specific issue because I didn’t get annoyed by that before Qubes and I’m pretty sure there are no issues with hvms. At least I haven’t noticed yet.

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I’m sorry I didn’t look your video before posting. That video and panning wasn’t smooth not even at 240p.

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No problem. I did not believe you anyway :slight_smile: Thank you for admitting.

As I said, no version of Qubes OS is able to play this video on ANY hardware even in 1080p without micro-lagging.

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Fullscreen or embedded?

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I tested this vid using VLC in 240p, 480p, and 1440p on both a Qubes machine (tigerlake) and on a Pixel 7 Pro with Graphene OS. There was a very tiny bit of noticeable choppiness in all scenarios, but it was actually worse on the Pixel.

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