Firstly, i want to say that I am mindful of criticizing something that is so good as qubes and developed by the tireless efforts of great people. I can’t thank you all enough.
I have been a qubes user for a few years, but recently decided to use it on two laptops as my daily drivers. Yes, I use two laptops. Work and home.
I have to say that I had virtually zero issues with the version before this one (almost). I updated to the latest version and there is a litany of issues that have me thinking that maybe I can’t trust the stability of this release. Below are some of the problems that I have now that weren’t there on the previous release. Just for the record I run both of these qubes on lenovos, an x230 (16gb) and a w530 (32gb).
- The inconsistent starting of sys-usb. There is nothing more annoying then starting my laptop when I need it go to have sys-usb not start. Sometimes this can be fixed by manually starting it, but about 30% of the time I get a message something like ‘unable to start’ and I have to reboot it.
- On both machines qubes occasionally boots but won’t recognize wifi. Have to reboot. And rebooting takes a while with this monster.
- I have had numerous occasions of the system freezing. The most recent example was that I couldn’t access anything on the top panel. Right or left click only gave me the panel preferences. Opening a terminal with right click was ok but keyboard didn’t work. Reboot.
- Unable to shut vms down. It gets caught in a loop of shutting down and then restarting. Reboot.
- The one that has me most concerned was today. This is a replay of an issue that I did have in the previous release. At the LUKS pw prompt it wouldn’t accept my password. I learnt from last time that inputting my pw very sloooooowly will have it accepted. Last time this happened I found out about the slow input after I’d done a reinstall. After inputting the pw slowly it booted into a “maintenance” window with a command prompt that was something like $sha (I think - I didn’t note it). I had no choice but to hard power off and reboot. On reboot it took my pw ok, ie no need for slow input, but then no wifi. A reboot and normal restart is where I am at now.
There have been other issues which I haven’t noted. But I am now worried that on any boot up it will not operate and my work of configuring this for my situation will be lost. I am no expert with qubes, and there may well be steps to take at the "maintenance’ window (happy for some inks), but my confidence is now shaken. Some may say that maybe qubes isn’t for me, which may be right, but I can’t help thinking that the versions of qubes that I scrubbed for this latest release was far more usable for someone at my level. I know my way around the system and am getting more confident but I worry that something will crop up that I haven’t seen before and I will be stuck (like the “maintenance” window today which luckily, so far, allowed a successful reboot).
I have posted this just as a marker of my issues, to see if others have similar problems, and if there are some things I could do to help these things.
As I said at the start, no offense is meant to the great developers and the community who have at least made something as complex as qubes accessible to a relative luddite like me. I just hope that some improvements take into account some of these things.
Thanks for reading.