Qubes OS display protocol uses X and isn’t compatible with wayland.
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I have been using 4.2.0-rc1 for a few hours. Looks great. The UI improvements appear to be more user friendly, such as the new dialogs when creating a new qube. The Qubes menu is nice but the qube name could be larger (the small font is not immediately readable). I think device handling is better as I have tried using conferencing software with an external USB webcam, which was quickly connected, I felt it was faster than 4.1 version.
The installer went with usb enabled on dom0 then I run the salt to enable sys-usb but it failed at the grub usb hiding step. nevertheless after reboot the sys-usb was there and rejecting usb input devices and after adding policy it was working fine.
My existing templates worked fine before upgrading their repository to qubes 4.2, so I used them and upgraded them in place. So far no problems.
I am testing on Ryzen 9 and have to say that 4.2 is running MUCH better than expected. Lots of UI issues, is this the best place to report - seems cumbersome to have to write up lots of issues on github. The only non UI issue I have come across so far (apart from avoiding mapping the USB controller for mouse and keyboard) is that when using USB ports the first device plugged into a controller works as expected, device avail, attach it, detach and all is well then the same socket does not work the second time (no detection). Move to another socket to get another attach… eventually run out of sockets/controllers and then plug a device into any port and sys-usb goes into an infinite loop saying device avail, attach, detach immediately, about once a second. Restarting sys-usb (disposable) fixes it and you can go again till you run out of ports.
Performance of the AMD is much better than expected as well due to its large L3 cache, 4x throughput in my application compared to an old i7 running smt (not running smt yet on AMD). Base system seems quite solid.
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I know it’s still early and there will be time for more technical users to elucidate the improvements from 4.1 to 4.2, but I’d also be very curious to understand the security implications of selinux introduction to fedora, and how that might change our thinking RE: fedora vs debian as default, minimal templates vs fedora-38-SELinux, versus kicksecure.
Given Debian-12 is available for Qubes testing is the expectation Qubes R4.2 will be released with Debian-12?
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Yes.
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Do I understand correctly that the Qubes-Whonix 17 [1] release (based on Debian 12 bookworm) will only work with Qubes R4.2 ?
I’m running Qubes R4.1, so even though I’ve upgraded my Debian template to Debian 12, I should probably wait to upgrade Whonix.
Thanks!
That’s what they said in the release announcement.
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Yes, that’s correct. Whonix 17 is not available on Qubes 4.1:
Yes, you’ll have to upgrade to Qubes 4.2 before you can use Whonix 17.
On R4.2, my thinkpad T470 has working suspend and resume 
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I apologize if the answers to this appeared elsewhere.
I know that to run the release candidate a complete install is necessary. And I know that once it’s actually released, you will be able to just run update to get it. (At least that’s what the first post says.)
I presume that templates (like debian 12) will still have to be downloaded, and any cloned templates will have to be rebuilt? (And appvms will have to have their templates changed.) In other words debian-11 templates will not update to debian-12?
In the long term, a rolling release such as Arch should be considered as many breaches may happen due to too complicated unfollowed upgrading procedures.
Not automatically, and for good reason. We cannot assume that every user wants to upgrade all of their Debian 11 templates to Debian 12 at the same time in the same way. Some users might want to keep some templates on Debian 11 for a while. Some users might have made customizations to their Debian 11 template that would be broken by a forced automatic upgrade.
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Agreed, and it’s nice to know.
I’m sure I don’t want to bite all of that off at once.
I wouldn’t mind doing the templates first, if they are ready before 4.2 is released.
A post was split to a new topic: Why the disk encryption phrase has the option of ‘f1’ to hide the bullets
I don’t really (personal opinion) enjoy the new menu, I find it less practical and dom0 console is hard to find. Nonetheless, the old menu lost all the icons/colors 
R4.2 adds split-gpg and split-ssh management in the Qubes global settings GUI, this should be added to the new features list, it’s a huge usability improvement
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Thanks for the suggestion!