Hello, I’m new to Qubes OS.
I’ve used the search bar and looked for Lenovo P50s and crossed referenced it to the Hardware compatibility list (HCL) | Qubes OS.
The model is not on the HCL. (There are many p50 and p51, but not p50s in that list and also in reddit history.)
A person is selling this in my local area that I could purchase:
Lenovo P50s
Intel i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50GHz
Nvidia Quadro M500M 2 GB dedicated GPU/video card + Graphics (HD 520)
15.6" FHD (1920x1080) IPS screen
32 GB RAM (2 x 16GB)
Samsung 512 GB SSD
The cpu, and HD 520 gpu can be matched in the different HCL laptops. However, the Lenovo laptop P50s model isn’t there.
My question is if the P50s or any other laptop that has met the system requirements and there are a ton other laptops that does System requirements | Qubes OS is the HCL the holy grail of laptop compatibility list for Qubes? What about the others that aren’t on the list like the P50s, have they been tested yet?
I am hoping not to go on trial and error of buying used laptops/computers for my first time installation of Qubes OS.
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If your laptop is not in HCL list or on forum/mailing list then it means that nobody tried to install Qubes OS on it and didn’t reported anything about it.
It doesn’t mean that Qubes OS won’t work on it.
You can search HCL for the same CPU/GPU and if you see them as working then there are higher changes that your laptop will work as well.
You can also install Qubes OS on USB drive if you have a working laptop available and then try to boot the Qubes OS from this USB drive on the laptop you want to buy before paying fr it you’ll also need to change BIOS settings to disable Secure Boot, enable VT-x and VT-d, change storage mode from RAID to AHCI/NVME, maybe some other options as well):
- Qubes can be installed on a USB flash drive or external disk, and testing has shown that this works very well. A fast USB 3.0 flash drive is recommended for this. (As a reminder, its capacity must be at least 32 GiB.) Simply plug the flash drive into the computer before booting into the Qubes installer from a separate installation medium, choose the flash drive as the target installation disk, and proceed with the installation normally. After Qubes has been installed on the flash drive, it can then be plugged into other computers in order to boot into Qubes. In addition to the convenience of having a portable copy of Qubes, this allows users to test for hardware compatibility on multiple machines (e.g., at a brick-and-mortar computer store) before deciding on which computer to purchase. (See generating and submitting HCL reports for advice on hardware compatibility testing.) Remember to change the devices assigned to your NetVM and USB VM if you move between different machines.
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Informative, helpful response and a practical tip with the USB stick that I would definitely go for. Thank you so much.
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