Questions before installing Qubes OS

[whiteman808]

What performance should I expect if I decide to install Qubes OS on corebooted Lenovo ThinkPad X220 with the specs: Intel Core i5-2540M, 16 GB RAM, SATA SSD and on the second PC with 32 GB RAM, Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, NVME disk?

Can I run every task like running Docker containers, IDEs on the Qubes like I did on the Arch Linux, Gentoo?

Can Qubes OS be customized to run on ZFS or btrfs for example and to use some favorite lightweight window manager instead of Xfce?

Can I do GPU passthrough on Qubes and Qubes OS be used for running LLMs, compiling larger apps, playing games, commercial applications without significantly degrading performance if I run this stuff on top PC with spec like AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and 128 GB RAM?

[KitsuneNoBaka]

16GB machine will be for e-mail and light www browsing

32GB one is little better

Why do wan’t to run containers when every qube is a separate machine?

[lars-qubes]

@whiteman808

Can I do GPU passthrough on Qubes and Qubes OS be used for running LLMs (…)

Yes, you can. Quite a few Qubes user did it including myself. Her is one sample guide:

Secure AI Inference with Qubes OS: A GPU Passthrough & Ollama Guide

This guide is made using AI. The model used was qwen3.5:27B This guide will go through the steps needed to set up a qube for running GPU accelerated AI inference, and how to integrate AI in multiple AppVMs using a single GPU. Hide the GPU from dom0 PCI devices cannot be assigned to multiple VMs simultaneously. You will crash the system if you attempt to pass a GPU to any VM while it remains attached to dom0. To prevent this, you must hide the GPU from dom0 before assigning it. In dom0, use l…

PCI passthrough success depends on your hardware virtualization.

[fsflover]

You can have btrfs on Qubes:

Question about btrfs setup

Yes. THe automatically created btrfs layout is fine and will work. And in fact, the official Qubes OS openQA unittests create just one btrfs subvolume for the tests. See line 41 to 47:

You can install KDE but probably not other DEs:

Install Cinnamon on dom0?

Cinnamon is not supported in Qubes as of now. Sadly, Qubes requires changes to the desktop environment for security contexts (window border colors), amongst probably other things. IIRC, these modifications are done on a per-environment basis and Cinnamon just isn’t one that’s been done. If you have the requisite programming knowledge, you’d be able to do this yourself by reading the code that Qubes made and adapting this to Cinnamon, but I have no clue how hard or involved this would be. On i…

[frenchfry]

@KitsuneNoBaka

16GB machine will be for e-mail and light www browsing

I use a 16GB machine (I’d love to have far more), and I do much much more than this.

Cheers,

[frenchfry]

Hi,

If the question is: Can I change Qubes OS?

The answer is: Yes, you can, but I advise you not to…
… unless you are a systems and security and Qubes OS guru and you have a lot of free time.

If you’ve got several machines, that might be a good starting point to install Qubes OS on the best-suited one (see HCL & documentation & contributions here) and start using it for use cases aligned with what Qubes OS is intended for: protecting our security, anonymity (when necessary and feasible), and data.

Cheers,