May I install Qubes in my laptop?

[alzer89]

@Vik19

dom0 must be preserved as clean as it is possible: nothing into it, only in separated qubes.

Pretty much. Think of it as the “control and operations centre” for your computer.

@Vik19

As I said my intention would be to try the Qubes installation,

When you say “learn”, what do you think you need to learn?

There isn’t that much of a learning curve to Qubes OS.

• The standard desktop environment is XFCE
  • You can install KDE and i3, but those packages might not be receiving the same love as XFCE…
• All your VMs run in the same GUI, so the applications of multiple VMs are stacked on top of each other in the same desktop
  • It’s not like most VMs, where each VM has its own window/screen
  • Although you can do this if you want with an HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine). Currently this is the only way to run Windows 10 & 11 (but they’re working on getting tools to get it to behave like any other Qube)

The only major differences are:

• Each one of your hardware components get its own VM
  • Your network hardware gets one, your USB bus(es) get one, and you can create a separate VM for any other piece of your hardware that you might not fully trust.
  • These VMs can “pass their hardware through” to the other VMs
  • This is facilitated and approved by dom0, which is why dom0 needs to do absolutely nothing except facilitate that passthrough. dom0 can see everything, which is why if something nasty gets into dom0, it’s referred to here as “Game Over™“
  • These VMs won’t pass anything through unless it’s approved by dom0. That way, if anything nasty gets into one of your VMs, it should be contained inside that single VM, instead of pwning your entire computer.
• When you plug stuff into your computer, you will have to do one extra step of “attaching” that device to the VM that you want to use it in.

But that’s basically it. Everything else works just the same as your standard XFCE desktop

@Vik19

I already created several VM in Ubuntu: for example I have one with Manjaro and one with Mint.

If you wanted to, you could take those VMs that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into making, and turn them into Qubes.

Standalones and HVMs

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-template-hvm-of-any-os/4676

@Vik19

I found instruction about installing Qubes on a VM (https://www.makeuseof.com/install-qubes-os-on-virtualbox/). I’ll try this and let you know!

Give it a go, but there is a chance that you might not get the “full Qubes OS experience”. Make sure you activate nested virtualisation. There’s also a chance that some things might not behave properly…

Nested virtualisation should be reasonably fast on a beast like your computer.

@fsflover

You can try Qubes OS by installing it on a USB stick. You will not have a sys-usb in this way, and it could be slow, but if it can work, it will.

@fsflover is right. This is also one way for you to “try” Qubes OS.

You can also swap your SSD to try it if you want. You can reasonably get away with 64GB if you just want to “try it out”.

Up to you