Paid learning material project (book, videos, how-to?)

General Discussion
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Hello,

I’ve had a plan for a while and wanted to start writing a book to help beginners get started properly with Qubes OS. I currently make a living from writing technical documentation and doing devops/devsecops consultancy, and this would allow me to work on Qubes OS :slight_smile:

After thinking about it, I’m not sure a book would work best for Qubes OS users:

  • hard to ship a hardcover copy worldwide
  • technical ebooks may not be practical
  • a full book may be boring for many

Finally, I thought it would be better to ask the community about what kind of learning material they would be ok to pay for, which format (text, video) is preferred, and what kind of payment would work for them (it seems a highly percent of users here prefer monero over everything else).

Another method could also be to reach a certain amount of money (maybe with the help from the Qubes OS foundation?) and make the learning material open source and free for everyone. I just need to get paid correctly for the job, this kind of content doesn’t make much money over the long run as it become obsolete rapidly, so I’d be fine with a one shot operation to contribute to open source :heart:

Feel free to share your thoughts

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Even though, I would love to see a blue book about Qubes in my book shelve, a lot of things change too fast as you have already mentioned.

I could imagine a book about more or less static information (e.g. inheritance, where to setup up things (e.g. with disposables, …)) being more successful.
A book might also increase the popularity in QubesOS…

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Maybe a slim book, wouldnt be a bad idea. Im thinking something like how to use qubes daily, with examples for 101 beginners. And maybe a second one or third one, technical.

Nice idea!

A

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I the only people who actively use, and keep using Qubes are those individuals who are -somewhat geeky people. Whereas many of who need to use Qubes, are - such as, Journalists, who, I suspect, would not be willing to devote more than two hours to learning how to use Qubes safely.

What is missing in the current implementation of Qubes? Obviously Qubes is delivered to us as more like a ‘tool kit.’ That is not a criticism of the Qubes Developers. What the next step to make Qubes usable to non-geeky, non-techy people is a more finished Operating System, which has usable software, That is third party software.

Yes, Third party software increases the attack surface.

Yes, ordinary people do not know how to choose third party software that is safe. And what is considered safe today, may change tomorrow.

I like the idea that unman presents in his simple implementation of Qubes. That is to provide an entire Qube to point and click install. In the case of his stuff, like Solene, to keep all those things functional, and to add more. What is needed is money for the techy to keep it working. More than half the time spent on software is spend on maintaining software, compared to first time development.

Also putting unmans PGP verification key into dom0 is unsolvable to a non-technical type.

What is needed, is an App Store, and the un-popular part of that is that people must pay to get and use Apps. Which is going to rub those who advocate free software the wrong way. And is profiting on the bones of Free Source software.

And price to consumers, How much would anyone pay for a Qube that is a Click and Install App for a specific VPN???

How to keep free source from duplicating a pay for App, and offering it for free?

That is, I am advocating something like the Apple model of an App Store.

I don’t see how one can keep the typical believers in free software rights folks from sabotaging the concept. ??? Red Hat gets around that, as it seems to me, by offering support as part of the package.

We see Dasharo, as part of taking a step forward in Security, has ways to get revenue.

If one built a version of Qubes, for say a Journalist. Then sold your entire package to some ruthless business type who will market it at exorbitant prices. Given the way the world is going, While he might just steal the idea and the emulate the code (buying it only protects him from one set of lawsuits, as he can claim he is legal owner, and has a right to market it, as a Copyright)

Qubes is unusable for non-geeky people. Either be a geeky person, or spend thousand or two thousand hours getting up to speed.

Right now, Qubes, from the stand point of a newcomer, seems to sabotage the very implementation of other programs into being used inside Qubes.

For what is in Windows is a point and click install of a program, can be, for a new geeky person, a whole weekend project.

All right, Limit these Qubes Apps to those programs that are not suspected of being owned by someone selling user data, or having, authoritarian, sinister connections.

Purism already offers a set of software Apps, such as a safe, sandboxed use of Metta, (FaceBook) I would not want to spend the weekend trying to install that in Qubes.

All I can say, if you build a Qubes App store, you will find someone will find a way to hate you, sabotage your efforts. but for Qubes to take a step into being useful. It seems a necessary direction.

Mods, i started another thread with this as first post. I am all right deleting, this as you think appropriate.

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I think there’s a place for a book in the world. There’s still some old Slackware and RH6 books on the shelves at my place of work. I think some salient topics would be what one would/could do after they install Qubes. That’s where the real magic happens and the trial and error begins.

AppVM build scenarios. Fun sys-net stunts. Things of that nature that the documentation online cannot really speak to fully. I think the Packt methodology might work too. Physical with e-book option or e-book alone. E-book is periodically updated. Some things to consider.

Edit: I’d buy the book. I have enough staff at work wanting to play with Qubes but not knowing where to begin (“Ummm. Burn the ISO and install? And then play?”). Many folks need some structure to begin their journey. Books fill that void.

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For an ongoing documentation writing (and I wouldn’t discard curation!) project, I’d find Patreon or OpenCollective convenient.

Again, with an ongoing model for written material, I think selling the most recent edition and releasing the other may be an option. I’ve seen authors that I support do that, though I can’t say if that covers their costs (and I suspect it doesn’t). Qubes OS may be releasing slowly enough to make that and option worth considering though. (I’m assuming a new edition may only be warranted for M.m releases, as they tend to concentrate major changes like the firewall configuration that you worked on when 4.2 was upcoming.)

Format-wise: I’d find a digital book useful. The content is the trickiest question IMHO.

Thoughts on content (maybe off-topic) I'd personally find useful part or a combination of:

  • fundamentals:

    • how do common threats involving computer works
    • why compartimentalizing may be a mitigation
    • to protect what?

  • fundamentals of the current Qubes OS implementation:

    • what’s Xen role?
    • why having different degrees of persistence (templateVM, appVM, dispVM) may come handy?
    • this is explanation material, unlikely to change much over time)

  • more fundamentals:

    • is my problem Qubes-specific?
    • how to make an educated guess
    • where to find help
    • also explanation material

  • cookbook-style patterns: very much like the Community Guides, maybe based on them, but professionally curated and edited

    • bonus points: sorted by complexity, with a trade-off discussion when multiple degrees of sophistication may make sense (e.g. appVM or dispVM sys-net)
    • this is more like how-to material. I really think there would be a lot of value in that, and that could be an edition-driver: new edition, new or updated recipies.

  • practical advice (maybe geared towards IT professionals):

    • setting up Qubes OS for end-users (e.g. a collection of fundamentals + cookbook-style recipes to follow @unman’s advice of organizing the UI around tasks rather than domains)
    • under the assumption here that a significant amount of meaningful deployments are not individual efforts but organization policies supported by professionals (who might use a hand and some knowledge sharing because they likely also support N unrelated other systems)
    • there some explanation, some how-to material in this

Note: I use the terms explanation and how-to in the sense of Divio’s documentation system.

Aside:

Not exactly what you’re asking, but I’d also consider options like Google Season of Docs, for ad-hoc funding. (My evaluation of how much willing the community is to pay for useful content may be wrong, but I believe that raising decent-wages amounts is unlikely from individual community donations alone. Wishing to be wrong!)

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I see two main paths:

  • Find a way to get paid for creating official learning material (e.g., official docs and videos).
  • Create unofficial learning material, make it more popular than the official learning material, and monetize it somehow.

The latter might sound odd at first, but I actually don’t think it’s that weird. Consider Windows. Microsoft does have its own Windows learning material, but it seems like the most popular Windows learning material is from unofficial, third-party sources. Maybe that’s because the userbase is sufficiently large; I don’t know. Even so, I think that if your unofficial material were consistently better than the official material, it could eventually become the go-to source. (I can even imagine a possible scenario where it eventually makes sense for the project to “outsource” its learning material needs to you. But this would require a concerted effort and a serious commitment, since the project would have to think about what would happen if you suddenly decided to take down your site or something.)

I worry that anything other than the two main paths above may not get enough traction to be worthwhile.

However, if you’re willing to broaden the scope beyond the creation of learning material, then paid advising/coaching/tutoring could be lucrative. This could be one-on-one in-person or over a video call or phone call, or it could be training sessions for groups (e.g., companies, non-profits). I imagine your main challenge here would be getting a steady stream of clients who can afford to pay enough to make it worth your time.

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Thanks for your ideas so far.

One other solution I forgot to share about would be a crowfunding with tiers, and publish the result as open source. This would allow me to not work in the blind, it would still be open source to everyone, and if it fails to reach the first tier this would give me a measurement of the community interest for documentation. I mean here that between having 0 support and reaching the first tier, we would know how many people were interested into this, so maybe this could end as a production more tailored for these people, as a fallback.

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I the only people who actively use, and keep using Qubes are those individuals
who are -somewhat geeky people. Whereas many of who need to use Qubes, are -
such as, Journalists, who, I suspect, would not be willing to devote more than
two hours to learning how to use Qubes safely.

The visible part that’s being shown publicly is just what’s on the surface. I
don’t know who also does use it as part of their internal company infrastructure
or doing their computing without showing off at all.

Although such people, if using the publicly available version, do need to put in
the work to get into the mindset and workflow needed. An appliance tailored
towards specific needs would be nice, but then someone needs to design it, build
it and maintain it. Either in their free time or as part of a job - with the
latter, how would a business like this operate?

What is missing in the current implementation of Qubes? Obviously Qubes is
delivered to us as more like a ‘tool kit.’ That is not a criticism of the
Qubes Developers. What the next step to make Qubes usable to non-geeky,
non-techy people is a more finished Operating System, which has usable
software, That is third party software.

What third-party software does this paragraph refer to?
What does “usable” mean here?

I’m asking as these terms can mean multitude of things in this context.
“Third-party” can refer to the distros that are packaged as part of the
official templates provided by Invisible Things Lab or it can mean an
EULA-backed hard-to-get niche-case application.

Continuing this, “usable” can mean dozen of things, but I suppose this refers to
a specific use case, of which I wrote in an earlier paragraph. Is that so?

Also putting unmans PGP verification key into dom0 is unsolvable to a
non-technical type.

There’s something more difficult than following a walkthrough and copying
instructions, basically replicating what it says. The harder part is “trusting
trust” and how to make sure such a walkthrough was written by its author with
good intentions rather than being something a malicious actor wrote and
impersonated the original writer.

What is needed, is an App Store, and the un-popular part of that is that
people must pay to get and use Apps. Which is going to rub those who
advocate free software the wrong way. And is profiting on the bones of Free
Source software.

And price to consumers, How much would anyone pay for a Qube that is a Click
and Install App for a specific VPN???

As I wrote earlier, the thing gets more complicated when it comes to writing an
actual business plan. Though I’m not discouraging anyone from doing so, but
quite the opposite - I wouldn’t mind one being discussed even in public.

If one built a version of Qubes, for say a Journalist. Then sold your entire
package to some ruthless business type who will market it at exorbitant
prices. Given the way the world is going, While he might just steal the idea
and the emulate the code (buying it only protects him from one set of
lawsuits, as he can claim he is legal owner, and has a right to market it, as
a Copyright)

While I won’t dive deeply into licensing and legal stuff, I think that once you
made something, it should remain yours. The recent xz incident comes to my mind.

For example, when I’m writing a document and share it publicly, I make sure to
put a license note at the bottom. While it’s possible to break it and don’t care
about it, issues due to such behavior may arise sooner or later.

Qubes is unusable for non-geeky people. Either be a geeky person, or spend
thousand or two thousand hours getting up to speed.

For what is in Windows is a point and click install of a program, can be, for
a new geeky person, a whole weekend project.

While I could understand that currently one shall preferably grasp some
concepts, like the differences between AppVMs and TemplateVMs, I’ll remind that
people come from different environments with different experiences and
expectations, so what is simple for one person, might be difficult for another
one.

For example, the “point and click install of a program” is not that easy for
me - I don’t have a standardized way of verifying signatures (certificate chain
trust is another thing) and usually installers contain EULAs that I’d rather be
aware of - the good thing is that whenever a license like GPL is presented, I
can skip reading it with a sheer amount of confidence.

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Frankly, these efforts would better serve the official documentation (a community effort) which is in need of many updates, clarifications, streamlining, and more, for both beginners and advanced users.

My .02.

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I’d be more than happy to work on the official doc, but in the end, free contribution doesn’t pay my bills. I can’t do everything for free.

I worked on the official documentation early 2024 to rewrite the firewall guide about nftables because it was really urgent with 4.2 being freshly released. However, they are still waiting to publish the new documentation platform to get in touch with me to contract for more documentation work.

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I would like to see more people use Qubes, and I think what keeps many of them out is the gap between their current and needed knowledge about qubes-OS. At the time, I spent a few months building and arranging in my head and on paper what I want this new operating system to achieve for me, even before I started to learn how to make this all work.
So regarding your book, here’s my $0.02

  • explain the concept and benefits of compartmentalization and the concept behind Qubes-OS. It isn’t something that will change or grow old with time and it is precious understanding for anyone who wants to make good use of Qubes.
  • Discuss the many ways Qubes can be used and benefit the user, with daily use cases. For example, I use disposable app-vm to provide remote support to clients. Connection is always made with client-2-site VPN and using disp-qube allows me to keep several connections to several clients/servers at the same time, which is something that I couldn’t do with any other operating system because of vpn client limitations. Of course, using a disposable (“sterile”) OS to provide support is also more secure and professional. This section too is about usage and concepts and so doesn’t need updates whenever Qubes-OS change.
  • I think many people would benefit from a short guides for building a specific qube for a specific purpose. diving into the forum and fighting our way into a solution isn’t for everyone. It can be a set of short guides for achieving popular needs. “build a qube for media”, “build a qube for accessing your bank accounts”, “build a qube for your mail client”. People can then choose to combine those guides according to their needs and the risks they’re willing to take (access their bank account and email from the same qube). These guides may change during time as Qubes evolve (the firewall change is a good example) but that is why many books are being re-printed every few years with relevant updates (you may want to offer a discount for people who already purchased the book when they come again to buy the updated version). The important thing is that even without being most recent, the book will still have value because of the parts explaining the concepts and uses. compartmentalization and isolation is something so basic that it will always be relevant. People be outrageous if their dentist won’t use new gloves with each new patient but still use the same computer/OS for all their needs :slightly_smiling_face:
    So the book I would like to see is a one presenting the wonderful and beneficial concept driving Qubes-OS, that will leave the reader with the feeling “Hey, this sounds less complicated right now, I think I can do that”
    Regarding format, I would suggest going with the cheapest option for you (e-book?). My one-time experience with publishing left me almost break-even mainly because of the printing and distribution costs, which I had to pay upfront and then forced me to set a higher price than I intended to.
    Wishing you luck with your book :+1:
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I think @adw’s comments on the subject, sum up pretty perfectly my ideas.

Let’s not forget that there is also a component of giving back to Qubes following the FOSS ethos. I personally prefer for there to be a general sense willingness to publish these materials for free and eventually charge for trainings / bespoke sessions. Many YouTubers have this model: high quality content public / open and behind the scenes content or consultations behind a paywall / fee.

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(moving this to General Discussion, since it’s Qubes-specific)

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I’d be willing to pay $10-25 for a well-structured Qubes e-book for advanced users ; ofc not structured as the (already great) official documentation. Curation would be precise : only most impactful topics, practical set-up or experimentation and making the reader follow a path where reading the whole would efficiently bring him from merely understanding Qubes to being a proficient Qubes user.

And more ($30-100 according to the extent of the content and update promises) for a video e-learning journey, organized in sessions I can come back too, skip any unrelated videos etc.

With an opportunity to offer a free chapter on how to start using Qubes (install to daily use) : giving back to the community, lowering the entry barrier for everyone and giving you exposure for the advanced, payed materials.

In profit made with the help of Qubes project, I would also require that a royalty goes to Qubes collective.

Would be happy to participate to a crowdfunding, don’t hesitate to ping me if you start one one day.

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The idea has merit and it would be great to see this happen in reality. When I first started using Qubes, it was very tricky due to my specific use cases and there wasn’t much documentation around them. It took me a while to research and build custom implementations to support those use cases.

Now on this particular topic:

  1. For an e-book, something which covers atleast this much material as Proxmox does (see here: Proxmox VE Administration Guide) would be very beneficial for tech-savvy users.

  2. For less tech-savvy people, the idea of personal tutoring/running mass classes/delivering workshops at conferences could be a good way to begin with.

I think conducting a survey (like the one from 2020) regarding this topic would give more actionable insights into the type of learning materials the users would like to see. Additionally, it might be prudent to expand this survey to entities who use Qubes on a regular basis, for e.g Guardian and willing to participate.

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Hello solene, I think you had a great idea, and I am willing to pay at least 50 USD on a physical manual or on an e-book. I agree with distopia’s point of view as well. I am an average user, but with a willingness to learn how to use Qubes regularly. I found this article enlightening: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-organize-your-qubes/. In the manual I would like, there would be a chapter dedicated to the creation of each scenario: one for Alice, one for Bob and one for Carol, with a step-by-step tutorial for the creation of each cube and the complete code for the scripts. I hope I have been helpful, good luck with your project ^____^

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