Is Qubes 4.3-rc1 useable?

General Discussion
1

I know it is in testing, but as I am reinstalling my system I was wondering if I should just install qubes 4.3 to save on future updates. Also, for my computer Qubes 4.2 has two annoying bugs. 1 it sometimes doesn’t properly wake from suspend. The backlight on the screen comes on but no login prompt. 2 sometimes after waking audio can be extremely jittery. For example after waking sometimes if I try and watch a video on youtube (or even an invidious instance) the video is choppy, the audio super glitchy, and it tries to play the video at x2 speed or even faster.

Now I only have a simple setup on qubes and don’t do anything out of the ordinary such as extensive system customisation so I was just wondering how peoples experience has been with QubesOS 4.3

I was just wondering how general system stability is and if flatpaks are working fine etc

2

maybe it might work “good enough for you” in its current state, maybe next update fixing problems will break your system entirely due to a bug. There are no guarantees for a release like 4.2 but developers make small incremental changes with lot of testing before, but a testing version receives a lot of changes regularly and expect its users to test them and report bugs.

You can certainly live with 4.3 and help testing.

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3

Same here. 4.3 was worth it, bugs aside. The devs will tackle the more complex issues soon enough.

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4

What bugs in general have you been noticing?

5

So when the devs update the 4.3 (before it gets released as stable) is each update reckless with a good probability of making my system totally unbootable? Does qubes feature any type of rollback system so if an update does brick my OS, I can just roll back pre boot? And do you have any idea, even just a guess, when 4.3 will become stable? When 4.2 was first released as testing, how long did it take before it became stable? And when 4.1 was first released as testing, how long did that take before it became stable?

You see, as debian 13 has just become stable, I thought I might as well try and upgrade everything at the same time as unplanned major upgrades are really bad for my workflow. In fact, I was going to upgrade to debian 13 even 3 months ago before it was stable (although I ended up not having the time to do so). And rolling releases don’t work for my workflow either!

Also, as I am experiencing bugs on 4.2 (such as the (occasional) audio glitching on wake, and (occasional) no login prompt after wake, I thought that maybe 4.3 would set things up for a higher chance of fixing these issues?

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6

This is an open source project with a small team, if you were looking for guarantees it is a wrong pick unfortunately.

Of course, everyone is doing there best to keep things stable and not introduce big bugs breaking users workflow, but it is not guarantee this won’t happen. It is more likely to happen on a development version as changes are pushed faster on a small user base, and it is not a production version after all.

Qubes are pretty solid with the templates systems and rollback, but unfortunately dom0 is easier to break and harder to rollback/repair.

I’d love to be wrong and that people using 4.3-rc1 from now will be happy and won’t have any issues and will be able to use 4.3 flawlessly once it’s released. If the current 4.3 version was ready to ship, it wouldn’t be called “release candidate”.

5 Likes
7

Ok I understand. QubesOS really is a great project and I can understand why it would be hard to predict such things. I will stay on 4.2 for now and closely watch the 4.3 testing to see how people who are using it report back its overall stability.

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8

If one uses btrfs, put dom0 in a subvol (e.g. dom0-4.2.4 and dom0-4.3), and var/lib/qubes in another subvol, and take snapshot before any update, you can always roll back to a working version in case an update breaks the system.
To extend the life of my SSD’s, I leave 10% empty space for over-provisioning, so I temporarily create a new partition to install the new qubes, and when all is done, I move all dom0 files into it’s new subvol, adjust fstap, crypttap and grub (dual boot 4.2.4 & 4.3-rc1).
I did the same going from 4.1 to 4.2, which is so much easier than messing around with LVM logical volumes, as now I don’t have to copy back all the payload-data after each install (unless something goes wrong, needing backups).

Same problem here, but after going into tty2 and back, the sound is usually back to normal.

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9

In my opinion it’s not usable (without hacks) until the following issue is resolved:

10

One more problem: The device widget in the taskbar has somehow become inactive and can no longer be clicked. This issue occurs in R4.3-rc1, both for installations upgraded from R4.2.4 and new installations. As far as I remember, this did not occur in earlier test versions of R4.3.

11

It is akin to asking “is my laptop a good door stopper?”. It depends what your use case is. :joy:

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It seems to work for me…

13

I found the cause for the device widget not working: This happens whenever Qubes is running without a sys-usb qube. If you install one, the widget works again, but this may be tricky if you are running the system from a device attached via USB.

I’ll file a corresponding issue.

2 Likes
14

Could you write a guide how to do it for the less knowledgeable users?

15

I already have (kinda). See my post BTRFS redundant disk setup (RAID alternative)
But re-reading my howto, I don’t remember how I solved the issue mentioned in last paragraph (about the appVM’s UUID)

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at your service @fsflover :bowing_down:, I just wrote this howto, documenting how my migration went: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/btrfs-migration-4-2-to-4-3-rc1-howto/36191
However, that post is currently under review, as it was stopped by Akismet, which claims to have a 99.99% accuracy at stopping spam…
… I guess I’m the 0.01% :joy: