I do not have a personal feeling about the matter, but I believe that the beginning-of-line position could be mis-interpreted as a badge… especially with the blue shield. It could suggest some level of trust that may not be warranted. This worries me, especially for new users who got caught up in the whole “Gotta harden my Qubes” mindset.
I would prefer the start of topic titles to be reserved for some indication of the audience/level, maybe in square brackets, and with some accepted criteria for guides suitable for beginners.
I always took this as a religion x) like vim or emacs xD
I would prefer the start of topic titles to be reserved for some indication of the audience/level, maybe in square brackets, and with some accepted criteria for guides suitable for beginners.
That I think is a REALLY good idea!
When looking at the Community Guides - Qubes OS Forum page, it just looks like a long list of… stuff.. I think this should get some structure, a nice pretty overview page, some sorting and alike. You can use the search on this, but its not a thing you can browse and find interesting new ideas and so on. You have to know what you’re looking for, which is not ideal imho.
I think the tweaking Qubes thingy is one of the most fun things about Qubes, and if Community Guides - Qubes OS Forum were cleaned up a bit, or better said properly presented / sorted and alike, this would make it a lot simpler to use.
There also is a case for using the forum Tags, because they give good integration in the forum search… except it seems more visible when it’s in the title.
I think that the problem of subjectivity is what has discouraged me, but I feel -subjectively- that there may be some objective criteria which could be applied… the problem is that of choosing criteria.
As a starting proposition, I would suggest for beginner level:
fixing “wrong tickboxes during installation” (possible with qubesctl only?)
fixing hardware-specific wrong device attachment quirks, no keyboard/mouse problems, and…?
cloning base templates and installing extra software for use as template for non-system qubes.
careful adding hardware support to clones of system qubes (i.e. keeping a fallback option)
updating…
backing up…
keeping an eye on lvm free space
introductions to qvm- tools for information gathering, use for above purposes.
probably other basic/housekeeping stuff…
Really, I would avoid anything:
with manual policy edit
grub hackery (except that required for the above)
mauling/modification of as-installed default templates
changes to as-installed Qubes system except for limited creation of new qubes
any mention of minimal templates, except “do not use minimal templates”
Maybe the list of exclusions is a better way to define the criteria.
Now, “Intermediate” and “Advanced” levels could be more complicated, but there are some guides that surely need a suitable warning flag. Copying long and regularly modified/experimental scripts to dom0 is a first one.
But -as @FranklyFlawless states- those are my prejudices, based only on my observation of comments on some of the existing guides. Ultimately, we have no formal mechanism for choosing or applying criteria for classifying!
We spent a lot of time here trying to fix the Community Guides mess and now I think that collection of links made by individual users, like qubes.taxi might be a better idea.
collection of links made by individual users, like qubes.taxi might be a better idea.
I respectfully disagree.
Two or more users might write guides on similar topics. There might be guides on “perfect wireguard vpn qube” and “perfect openvpn qube” and “perfect qube using mullvad gui” and so on. Those should all be in one spot.
I think the community guides should not be cramped into the forum format anymore, but properly ordered by category, so that users can browse through the categories to find multiple guides on the same / similar topics.
xD