One reason to keep a full template around!

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If you use minimal templates, you might be tempted to not keep a full debian or fedora template around.

However, I’m now very glad I did.

I took a road trip with the Librem -13 running QubesOS, the mini-me of my home system. And I ended up staying in a particular hotel for a week. One where the hot spot on my mobile surveillance phone did not work. The provider simply had no data signal there.

So…use the hotel WiFi right?

Couldn’t connect to save my life. I finally tried connecting my surveillance phone to the WiFi and found out why. It was one of those donkey setups where you have to log onto the WiFi via a browser!

Minimal qubes don’t come with a browser, and I didn’t install one on my wifi net qube’s template. So I was stuck; I needed to install a browser on that template to get internet, and I needed internet to install the browser.

I finally realized a couple of days later that I could simply change sys-net’s template to debian-12-xfce, temporarily of course.

All I had to do then was open the browser in sys-net and log in.

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these are the worst

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Thanks for sharing!

I guess a terminal-based web-browser will also not be enough due to Java scripts, am I right?

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Yes it’s unlikely to work

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I never even thought of trying a terminal-based browser, but I would be shocked if the thing didn’t use a Java script, or several gratuitous (i.e., not really necessary) ones, because web page developers love to add what I call “dancing monkeys” (useless fluff (especially animations) that sucks down bandwidth) to web pages. Since marketing types want the page to be “pretty,” guess what almost certainly happens?

When I write a web page for my own use, on the other hand, it’s bonestock HTML with maybe php, and likely to be considered antiquated and/or fugly.

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