Video playback is laggy when I use mpv though and I don’t really feel like fixing that… The only way to genuinely get better performance is buying yet another laptop with a better CPU.
But what about video conferences? And by that I mean Zoom.
I’ve only used VLC and have never experienced lagging (T430 or gen7 Carbon X1), so it doesn’t seem like a CPU issue.
My D used zoom on her T430 and experienced occasional video lags, but never anything that distracting or bothersome. It has been over a year now though, so I can’t vouch for more recent versions of zoom on Qubes.
I can respect that. Everyone has to judge for themselves what trade offs between comfort, usability, security and privacy are appropriate for their own situations. I had some rough spots myself recently during which I contemplated giving into the “feudal security” approach and return to Mac / OS X.
Ultimately for me this won’t work because Qubes OS has opened a whole new world of how I use computers to me that goes far beyond the security / compartmentalization aspect of it. Your situation might differ.
Beyond the obvious security benefits it’s the ability to have a whole laboratory of computers in one. Yes I could run VirtualBox or Parallels or whatever on the Mac but it would never approach the level of integration and goodness I get with Qubes OS.
I deal with many different projects that all need their own specific versions of stuff and environment. The only way to deal with that and not loose sanity are VMs.
Standard office stuff: emails, documents, lots of Teams and WebEx meetings, code reviews, embedded development. … definitely no YouTube / HD videos. If that were an itch of mine I’d get a $200 Android tablet and call it a day.
Not sure you can get your hands on SecureView although they do list “Business” and “Education”.
Yep. 
If that’s the “make it or break it” use case, why bother with Qubes OS?
Well, the premise is flawed. You can have fluid video playback in Qubes OS, even on 10+ year old hardware. But it might not be “out of the box” and not with every “box”. That’s the actual complaint here as I see it: that it can be exceedingly difficult to get Qubes OS to run to ones satisfaction on a specific piece of hardware. That’s neither new nor anything we hide. It just is.
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OK, fair enough; I withdraw my comment. Still, if one IS trying to watch YouTube videos (and I do do that, in disposable split-browser qubes) it’s nice to know you can handle multiples of them if you can.
And yes, we all seem to have our situations where fussy hardware causes issues. Just for instance, I never did get sys-audio to do a damned thing, though I may give it another go. And since I am going all-in putting QubesOS on my laptop as well as my desktop system, I will see if that works better.
It’s very straightforward to fix though: mpv --vo=x11
The manpage recommends to combine it with --profile=sw-fast but I haven’t seen that make a noticeable difference.
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Qubes claims to a single user desktop system, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a desktop system handle video streaming, any other desktop system has been able to do this for +10 years.
That said, I have used qubes on 3 laptops and 2 desktop system, and video has worked without any issue on all of them.
Let’s break it down what’s going on when you play a video in YouTube:
- your choice of template OS, your choice of browser, how much memory you assigned
- how many other qubes are running and how much CPU they are consuming
- software based rendering into a shared buffer
- that shared buffer is then rendered in dom0 or sys-gui using the driver/hardware available
I ran Qubes OS so far on three different computers: a DELL laptop (R3.2), a ThinkPad P51 and a ThinkPad T430. One should reasonably expect that the far new, much faster laptop (P51) would show better video performance then say the 10+ year old T430. But that’s not the case.
Is this a Qubes OS issue? A driver issue? A Fedora issue? Did I monkey it up by template/browser/memory choice?
It’s complex. If you run on a bare metal box with Linux/Windows/Mac you don’t have these issues, because you have direct hardware access and the OS can control how much CPU goes to the other processes. Of course it’ll be smoother there. But what about security? … compartmentalization?
My point: all this grandstanding about what one should be able to expect is besides the point… because you simply can’t compare those other systems to Qubes OS. They are not the same thing. They don’t work the same way. Hence you got interested in Qubes OS in the first place – right?
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I don’t know how hard or easy video playback is in a VM, maybe the rendering is more complex in Qubes OS, but it works in every other VM I use.
Not working in the same way doesn’t mean broken and expect nothing to work, I absolutely do think that people should expect to largely be able to do everyday tasks in Qubes OS as they would in Linux.
Qubes doesn’t have the same hardware support, and there are limitations and added complexity from the virtualization, I don’t think you should expect something like video playback to not work.
Maybe this is a glass half full or half empty situation, but I believe YouTube not working to be the exception, not the norm.
Did you switch between templates to rule out the possibility that a missing or bad driver happened to be shipped with the template that you are currently using? There was a time when I found video playback in fedora-based VMs was extremely laggy, but in debian-based it was quite smooth.
The problem with your visiting websites being slow is probably due to those websites having too many effects and JS scripts, and the CPU rendering nature of QubesOS. You can try with NoScript enabled, or uMatrix if you want some of its effects to work, and test if that makes the website render faster.
With what specs, and what’s the performance like? I might just give Zoom another try. And yes, I have fixed the video playback problem in the browser but not mpv. I think I’ll just change mpv’s default settings. . .
On my T430 using a debian-minimal based template running Brave. Just for the meeting 1GB of memory is enough, but you’ll get better results with 1.5GB or even 2GB just in case you need to open another tab or two during the meeting but in the same qube. All the other Qubes are pretty much idle. Obviously I don’t run backups or compile projects while in meetings, so at most there is some cycles in the signal or mail qubes being consumed.
The qube is a HVM with a dedicated USB controller and the Blue Yeti USB Microphone and Logitech for Creators StreamCam Premium are directly connected to it. I found that the quality of the video and audio is mostly impacted by the source, so I spend a little money there. Most meetings I just let run over my Starlink connection which is fine but introduces a little bit of lag/delay. When this becomes an issue I switch to Verizon LTE for the duration of the meeting.
In my personal experience the browser makes a huge difference. Firefox is just a dumpster fire at this point and Mozilla is obviously busy doing other things than taking care of their core product !?!? I digress. Brave seems to be most efficient in a low resource scenario (my impression). When it comes to performance I personally also get subjectively better results on debian-minimal, but that might be because that’s where I spent most time learning and tweaking.
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Thanks, I tried out Brave with some sites that were laggy on Firefox and it’s much smoother. I don’t think I’ll buy extra equipment for video meetings though, so now that’s my biggest problem. I can accept pretty much everything else about Qubes if I don’t try to troubleshoot and optimize that much.
If I had more of my work synced through a cloud service or used a self-hosted solution, then in theory, it wouldn’t be that bad to shut down Qubes, and just run Linux off an internal SSD with a USB adapter for meetings. Cryptomator could be a good choice, but I never got it to work. Does anyone have suggestions about this or alternative approaches to zoom meetings? I do have a tablet, but I wouldn’t be able to screen share important things, it’s too uncomfortable, and I look unprepared for the meeting as if I’m on my phone.
Related: QubesOS freeze, crash and reboots - #219 by tanky0u
+1 to that.
Interesting. Brave, however, also bloats its browser with crypto-wallet related addons (that nobody askes, honestly).
Have you tried Librewolf.net as a “less-bloated” firefox alternative? I wonder how it stands against Brave from the resource consumption standpoint.
I did use librewolf for some time but it made no noticeable difference performance wise for media consumption and other video related tasks. Brave performes much better.
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I have had the same experience, it doesn’t matter if you use Librewolf. The problem is in the Firefox core, as fare as I know forks like Librewolfs use the same codebase. Chromium just seems to have the best performance/optimization when it comes to JavaScript, video rendering, etc.
This is not a problem unique to Qubes OS, it is the same for traditional Linux, but with the resource limitation of the appVMs the issue becomes a lot more noticeable.
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Well there is ungoogled chromium… That has less obvious bloat! Anything with chrome or Google in the title makes my privacy feathers ruffle, but Brave uses the same base so whats the difference in practice?
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In my experience Linux never runs as well on laptops as Windows does. There’s always some stupid little hardware kink you gotta work out… Either the sound’s garbage, or you have no fan/noise control, or you can’t restore from hibernate… And yes I know Qubes “isn’t Linux” but I’d expect the same sorts of issues.
On a desktop though… 
best thing since sliced bread
What’s your use case?
I just need my Qubes pc for the vault qube to store my passwords where microsoft and the gubbyment can’t see them rofl. I wanted to use it as a router too (for network tunneling & chaining, which qubes EXCELLS at) but nooooooooo, apparently nobody knows how to friggin iptables with this damn thing… hint hint User Support
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For an operating system that’s this advanced, it seems like a good deal for a free product. I haven’t gave a dime and I get the collective knowledge of this forum so I can at least get the basics up and running. The people with real knowledge don’t hang out here, this is mostly just a place for us users.
Where do the wizards hang out then…? Please don’t say reddit