Buy a powerful high-end desktop system, is the answer to the last part of the title.
The laptop I use in the office is a Lenovo P14s with an i7-1260P CPU, running bare-metal Windows 11 on the laptop feels less smooth and responsive than running Qubes OS on my 9950X at home.
See also:
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This video will not be played smoothly on any CPU in Qubes OS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSv22DTDUI
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Fascinating test and sad truth. Choppy even when streaming the video in
mpv.
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.
Using minimal templates from service VMs to AppVMs and Disposable VMs (DispVMs) can eliminate performance issues like lag and choppiness. I’ve noticed that many users allocate excessive RAM to service VMs such as sys-firewall , sys-net , and sys-usb , which isn’t necessary.
From my experience, even on modest hardware, I’ve never encountered lag or stuttering in Qubes OS. I can smoothly stream 4K videos on YouTube using a VM with just 2048 MB of RAM and 2 vCPUs. Most performance complaints stem from using bloated templates that consume unnecessary resources. Switching to minimal templates significantly improves responsiveness and efficiency.
It’s not true see my above message
No, you are mistaken, you cannot stream smoothly even 480p in Qubes OS.
Try this video to get choppiness for any resolution:
No, templates do not matter that much. Open AppVM based on any “bloated template” and run top to find out that even bloated template consumes almost no CPU on idle.
No, you are mistaken, you cannot stream smoothly even 480p in Qubes OS.
I am willing to believe this more than anything else. Feel like I’m being gaslight around here sometimes.
People comprehend smooth differently. They think the video is smooth, but it is not. They either never saw the same video being played smoothly (like 60+ fps without any micro-lags), or simply do not catch the difference.
In fact, nobody on this forum ever actually proved that they have panning-train video from the topic without choppiness, not in 1080p, not in 480p. Everybody has this choppiness.
I’ll try to record a video on my phone showing this.
What is “panning train video”?
It’s up in this thread, a Youtube 4k video of a train, panning a lot and stressing any CPU rendering.
Got an update.
I tested some local videos and youtube videos via Invidious (I can’t play youtube videos directly, it bans my IP, and I haven’t figured out how to install VPNs yet).
I installed h.264. This was required to play some (or any?) videos. I also installed VLC. To my surprise, there are some local 4k 60fps videos that actually play very well, some 4k 30fps videos that play near perfectly. Mind you, this is on an i5 1135G7, not great by todays standards, also the videos I tested didn’t involve fast movement. My monitor’s refresh rate is 75 Hz.
Some videos only played on VLC, some only on Parole (default video player). Some played better on VLC, some played better on Parole.
I compared the video mentioned elsewhere on this thread. Comparing QubesOS on 1135G7 with Fedora WS on a custom gaming PC with high end hardware, the difference is night and day.
The issue I mentioned earlier about Nautilus is still present. Opening Preferences or About with Nautilus, the window opens very slowly.
I recorded videos on my phone for comparison but can’t be bothered posting, and it likely wouldn’t be super noticeable after compression and uploading.
So in conclusion, local videos, even 4k ones, can be acceptable (close to the frame rate of the video) even on moderate hardware, at least for videos that don’t show lots of fast paced movement. Youtube is noticeably choppy. And for some reason some apps (like Nautilus) are choppy. The fact that local videos play so well makes me wonder if the issue has to do with the browser. I used Brave.
Unrelated, but I don’t have any thumbnails showing up in Nautilus or Thunar, what’s the process for enabling thumbnails?