“Now You’re Thinking with Qubes”
The toughest concept for me to grasp was the bare metal virtual machines offered by Xen, and how beautifully Qubes built a collection of OS’s and VM’s to leverage them all, especially the chaining of VM’s providing networking services to other VM’s. Once I swallowed the pill, and made myself comfortable with it, I went hog wild.
I love lots of networking options, and this is where Qubes excels. As a linux junkie, I like renting VPS servers from various providers around the world, and using those servers for whatever I want. For $5/month each, they are dirt cheap, but gives me lots of great experience. I usually put a private VPN server on each one, to access it that way. Sometimes I’ll also install a tor entry-node server on it, to play around with tor. Most VPS providers don’t mind entry-node servers, they just don’t like exit nodes, so it’s not a problem.
I like to create a variety of networking options, frequently changing too, like:
sys-net-eth
sys-net-wifi
sys-vpn-losangeles
sys-vpn-chicago
sys-vpn-tokyo
sys-vpn-amsterdam
sys-tor-vpn-losangeles
sys-tor-vpn-tokyo
sys-tor-vpn-amsterdam
then work/play VM’s to access each of those, easily changeable, like:
play-vpn-tokyo
play-tor-vpn-amsterdam
work-vpn-losangeles
Qubes makes it so easy, that once you get used to it, the sky really is the limit. As new things pop up, like wireguard, I’ll play with those too.
As a rule, I don’t put anything sensitive or important on the laptop. It’s just for fun learning really. If it gets screwed up, I’ll just wipe the drive and start over.
I played around with “minimal” installs, minimal firewall, blah blah blah. In the end, it’s just not necessary, for me anyways. A Debian template and a Fedora template give you more than enough to handle almost anything. Sure, there are niche situations, and multiple templates can be necessary. We all do different things, which is another reason why Qubes is so great. The flexibility to do things so easily that other platforms do poorly, if at all, to me, is the greatest appeal.
Sorry I’m late to this thread. Couldn’t resist!