Hello everyone, I have been lurking around for more than a year but it’s only now, in the middle of the night, that I have decided to create an account and write my first post because this matter is one that concerns me quite a bit.
I share some of the concerns sven and qufo pointed out, mainly the fact that Qubes Air might have some negative consequences for non geeks as sven put it. I don’t think for a moment that the Qubes team will force people to use Qubes in the cloud, what worries me is this: “The beauty of Hybrid Mode is that the user doesn’t even have to be aware (unless specifically interested!) in whether a particular VM is running locally or in the cloud” This to me is not beautiful to me at all, I believe (both from the article OP posted and comments made by ADW) that users will have the option to not use the cloud at all and keep things entirely locally but what worries me is that many non tech savvy users that rely on Qubes for their safety, like journalists and social activists, might have some Qubes in the cloud and not even know it. I like the concept and the possibilities opened up by Qubes air, I do, but I am worried about the implementation. In my opinion, and I am sure of others too, Qubes air should be opt in, not opt out, Qubes should all be local by default and would be up to the user to change that, perhaps in Qubes settings there might be an option to place that Qube in the cloud or something similar. Perhaps a reassuring solution could be asking the user during installation if he wanted to use Qubes completely locally or if he wanted to have the ability to place them in the cloud, akin to the manner the user is asked if he wants to download updates over Tor or not.
Anyway, it would be great if someone from the Qubes team could add some more thoughts on this. Keep up the good work, my life would be much more stressful without this amazing OS.