I’m not tech savvy especially when it comes to hardware. But I am trying to switch to qubes because of my threat model.
I’m looking for a laptop that would be comfortable for me to use work with qubes, and I got to admit it’s quite difficult. One of the main issues I’ve been having is finding a laptop that has a completely integrated graphics card. I was wondering if the specs say that it’s integrated graphics card but also says that it’s a NVIDIA card, would that probably still work? What about a ‘Intel Arc A370M’?
To my humble opinion I would only buy hardware with Nvidia only if I will dual boot into OS where I can maxout everything from the power of the Nvidia graphics card. Otherwise just save some money and get an integrated GPU only hardware.
I’m not exactly sure what that means, so I assume I can’t do it. Only reason I’m asking about this in Nvidia card is because I found a laptop that fits all the other criteria besides for this one.
Integrated graphics simply means that the “graphics card” is integrated as part of the main processor. Most computers that don’t have a separate graphics card have integrated graphics, with Intel processors having Intel graphics.
If you are not very tech savvy and want to do the minimum amount of technical work possible to use Qubes OS, I would recommend buying one of the Qubes Certified computers: Certified hardware | Qubes OS .
If you’re fine with installing Qubes OS, but just want to make sure the computer can run it, you can look at the Community-recommended computers .
Otherwise, you can always try installing Qubes OS on a device you already own and just see if it works. The installer will tell you if there’s a problem.
Please let me know if this helps or if you’d like more information.
I can install qubes myself, I just need it to work once I install it. I won’t be able to run tons of commands to make it work. I installed cubes on an old laptop I have, and it worked fine. But I want a modern laptop, one that has touch, 32 GB of memory, a big screen etc.
In that case, there are two laptops currently that are guaranteed to work with Qubes OS, the NV41 Series 14 inch coreboot laptop - NovaCustom and the Purism– Librem 14 . I would recommend the NovaCustom NV41, as Purism has a somewhat poor reputation. Both of these laptops are modern and support up to 64 GB of memory and have 14" screens, but finding a laptop with a touchscreen that can run Qubes may be more difficult. Both of these laptops also happen to have the option to come with Qubes OS. There may be other laptops that work fine with Qubes OS, but don’t have enough documentation to support that fact.
I have seen in the past touch screen laptops that worked perfectly with qubes. I’m looking for one that fits criteria, and hopefully it works. That’s why I’m buying from Costco so I can always return it in case it doesn’t work. But I don’t want to buy a bunch of laptops just because they might work, I want to find one that meets all the criteria correctly and try to work with that one.
Thanks so much for everyone’s help up until now.
Does anyone know anything about the link that I sent, aka the ‘Intel Arc A370M’ graphics card? Does it work with Qubes?
The A370M is a dedicated graphic card, which is added on top of the Intel Xe GPU embedded in the Intel CPU.
That’s the Intel Xe that will be used to display things on your screen, and on Qubes OS, nothing is hardware accelerated to avoid the qubes to access the GPU. This means anything that requires a GPU for rendering will be slow. (this may be the most Qubes OS pain point for many users)
The dedicated card could be assigned to a single qube to give it access to the GPU and be able to render some stuff like video games, machine learning (“AI”) or video encoding/decoding, but this requires an extra monitor / keyboard / mouse and a complex setup.
The HCL does not contain a single report (positive or negative) about “Arc” nor “A370M”. That means it is definitely NOT RECOMMENDED for a user such as you describe yourself.