Personal introduction and thanks to the Qubes Team

General Discussion
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I’ve been using Qubes for about 18 months now. I just bought my first computer specifically designed to run Qubes, and I’m very pleased with it. For privacy reasons I won’t say what it is. Nothing special, just hardware common on the recommended hardware list. But now everything is quite fast, and I don’t have to worry about memory shortages.

Recently I went to the Reddit forum (r/qubesos) and noticed a lot of replies advising people not to install Qubes, especially for hardware reasons, for example not having an NVME, or only having 16GB of RAM. Is this some kind of directed effort to get people away from Qubes?

As a matter of fact, until yesterday, my Qubes desktop ran on an old i5 4 core with 16GB and a 7600RPM HDD. Was it slow? Well, it wasn’t fast. But for my use case it was acceptable, and I learned a lot, especially that I love Qubes. Nobody should be afraid of trying Qubes just because their machine is old. There is a lot of value in running Qubes even without all the security features or the latest hardware.

I would post that on Reddit, but they automatically shadowban accounts made by Tor users. So I am saying it here. Probably someone should post some clarifying remarks at r/qubesos since a lot of people will look there for advice and get discouraged.

I noticed today that the list of main contributors to Qubes is not very long. And poking around github I noticed that even fewer contribute much code to this project. And it makes me realize that projects like Qubes and Whonix rely on very few people, sometimes even just a single person, without whom the effort and direction would be lacking.

I hope that everyone reading this will think of some way of practically supporting core security projects, not just in spirit, but by action. Because from where I’m standing, privacy, anonymity, security, and peace are becoming increasingly hard to find.

That’s why I’m ride or die with Qubes and Whonix.

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Regarding the support/contribution etc: it would greatly improve if those behind the Qubes team engaged with the user community in a more collaborative manner and address the real issues with more care.

I’m occasionally monitoring the forum for a pretty long time and see lots of genuinely good people come and leave after a short period, me including.

I don’t share the trust given to Whonix and personally don’t use it.

All the rest is meaningless.

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I guess it’s just different people with different opinions, but I do think you are right about some people setting the “minimum requirements” too high.

On Reddit, most people interested in Qubes OS are just Linux users, who don’t need Qubes OS for a specific reason. There are people who try Qubes OS and go back to Linux, because their hardware runs Qubes OS a lot worse than Linux.

I don’t think it’s an effort to get people not to use Qubes OS, I think it’s more to avoid people having a bad experience, and then tell other people not to use Qubes OS. It’s just not easy to tell people what the minimum hardware requirements are for a “good experience”, but if you want to run Qubes OS and have it feel like bare-metal Linux, you really do need a somewhat modern system.

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