Qubes OS R4.3 repositories (NOT the ISO, NOT the templates) for dom0 and Fedora 39/40 (no Debian, Whonix, Archlinux, … repo at the moment) have been available since 17 April and are being tested by the testing team. This is the very early stage of preparation for the new release. Overall status of the project is available here.
It is something that I would not recommend to anyone at the moment as it might hardly break the entire machine and is not as forgiving as testing Fedora 40 or Debian 13 templates for R4.2.1
But we can observe the packages as there are many interesting ones in the pipeline:
Use this command anytime to track new dom0 packages in R4.3 which are not uploaded to R4.2:
I’d love to see something like this as well, but only out of impatience. It’d be cool to know what upgrades and features are coming, but waiting for the release won’t kill me (I think?).
If R4.3 gets released just when Debian 13 templates start rolling out, I can simply reinstall my whole system, which is just a little more work than upgrading all my templates.
The same thing happened for R4.2 and Debian 12. I absolutely wouldn’t mind if the Qubes release schedule somehow gets synced with the Debian release schedule from here on.
IIRC debian 12 came out just a bit before 4.2 did.
So I was able to upgrade templates, etc, to debian 12 on both machines (relatively painless), then take on 4.2 (which was not painless for me thanks to the changes to the names of links to domU menu items). IIRC I waited about a month after release to take on 4.2.
I installed the current weekly build yesterday on an HP EliteBook 840 G4 and, so far, everything seems to be running o.k.
One small nuisance, however: The directory /boot/grub2/themes/ and its contents are missing. While this is not needed by default as, since grub is started using terminal mode console, no themes are applied, it is no longer possible to use a more professional-looking boot by setting the terminal mode in /etc/default/grub to gfxterm. This behavior can be recovered by copying the directory from an R4.2 installation, but currently, I regard this as a regression.
Did you test installing Win10 yet by any chance? Have tried 3 different isos and no luck, just black screen. Same when importing my Windows VMs from 4.1, but I assume that is expected.
That’s just what I did by setting the grub terminal mode to gfxterm. In R4.2, this works, but not in R4.3, because there, the themes directory is missing. Restoring this directory from an R4.2 installation fixes this.
When Windows 7 starts, I get a small black window if qvm-features gui-emulated is set for this VM, and nothing at all if it is not set. Setting or unsettling qvm-features gui has no effect at all.
When I try to start the GUI manually via qvm-start-gui, qrexec-daemon-common complains about a missing file /var/run/qubes/qrexec.VMNAME. Indeed, there is no such file, but a link named VMNAME-dm, which is created at the start of the VM and deleted at its shutdown.
Trying to install a new Windows VM fails, too. When starting this VM and booting from a Windows installation ISO, the small black window appears, too, and nothing happens anymore.
But this does not seem to be caused by Windows: Booting a Mint installation ISO shows the same behavior, no matter whether the VM is declared as HVM or PVH.
