Qubes OS Overhauling Questions

User Support General
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I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to switch the distro used for Dom0, as I dislike Fedora pretty heavily, as well as it being extremely hard to minimize in terms of packages count. If it’s not possible, is there any way to build a version of Qubes to use a different dom0? If that’s not possible, is there at least any effort going into there being multiple dom0 options?

Ideally, I want to use something like Alpine or Gentoo for dom0, as I can minimize it as much as possible. If not, what are my other options for doing so?

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How far do you want to overhaul Qubes OS?

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Honestly? I want to change the majority of what Qubes is based on, in terms of templates and dom0. I already changed the desktop environment to KDE Plasma, but might go a step further and make a separate GUI qube to not have dom0 as heavy as it is with KDE in it when I get the chance.

I already changed to using custom debian-13-kde templates, but I’ve been dissatisfied with both Debian and Fedora in general, so I want to use something like Void or Gentoo for my templates. I don’t know if there’s a hard-built reliance on systemd, but if there is, then I would probably change my template list to accommodate that.

Since they aren’t officially offered yet, though, I might either do a manual Void install through its iso, or I might try using the Qubes builder to do Gentoo. I would just use the archlinux template, but it comes pre-conditioned with xfce unless built manually, and I’m not a fan of Arch in general, especially where I want a (somewhat) reliable system.

I would most likely change dom0 to be Alpine, Tiny Core, or something extremely minimal, if possible. If I can’t, then Debian would suffice, as long as I don’t have to mess with it often. I just dislike using Fedora due to the extremely slow package speeds, poor experiences with it in the past (I tend to have a much easier time building my own systems from scratch/near scratch than trimming an already existing system to my specifications).

All in all, though, it’s more of a project than anything actually serious. I do have a legitimate use case for Qubes, though. I use it for public networks as I don’t want to use a regular distro on potentially sketchy networks. Also opening potentially malicious USBs/Storage Volumes for investigation/data retrieval.

If all of the stuff that I’m asking for is crazy or excessive, which it honestly probably is, then I would most likely stick with my setup as it is. I’m mostly just trying to see if I can get it to work in the way that I’m envisioning. Since I typically use Gentoo on my other systems, having the ability to do all of this would make my experience using Qubes nearly seamless with Gentoo, excluding all of the virtualization.

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Okay, start with this:

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Also, see https://spectrum-os.org/

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The only thing that would make sense is switching to declarative (nixOS). Another “normal” distribution is matter of taste and waste of time.

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Related:

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Alright, made a bit of headway, and backed up the data that I got from gentoo-minimal. I

I want to ask about sys-gui-gpu, as I haven’t had success with it yet. I’ve gotten to the point where I (sometimes) have a bootable sys-gui-gpu, but the screen is extremely dark and unusable. Additionally, it never launches on boot, even after assigning the PCI device to the sys-gui-gpu qube alongside and setting default_guide to sys-gui-gpu.

Any relevant logs I should be reading through, or any troubleshooting steps I can try? I will try literally anything since I ended up just using my USB to reinstall QubesOS as I wanted to wipe the slate clean for sys-gui-gpu

Edit: for reference since it seemed very relevant, I am on a corebooted (SeaBIOS) Thinkpad T580, i7-8550u, no dGPU module. I do have a working thunderbolt port on my model as well, if that’s also relevant as a PCI device?