I am using an old Thinkpad T430 and I have been testing Qubes OS a little while ago on this machine, through an installation on a USB key. Everything was working fine and I liked the experience so I decided to make it the main OS of this machine.
So I took the last version (R4.3), wrote it on an other USB stick and installed it on the HDD. The problem is that is was completely unusable. Everything is pretty sluggish. Background appears slowly. A lot of error messages on sys-* qubes boot saying “Cannot connect to qrexec agent for 60 seconds”. After a fresh install, it takes at least 5 minutes after logging in, before reaching a stable state and getting the network working. And it is even worse after updating the different templates, it never succeeds to reach a stable state anymore, sys-* qubes just finally stop attempting to boot, only dom0 is running and no qube boot.
The difference with my working USB key install I noticed is that I was using Qubes R4.2.4, so I reinstalled a 4.2.4 version on HDD, and there everything was working fine, like it was on USB key. To be sure I did not fail anything during first R4.3 install, I reinstalled it again completely, I verified signatures, rewrote the install key, but the same result, everything was slow.
All the different AIs I used to help me solve this problem reached to the same conclusion: I have an IO bottleneck problem, due to installation on a HDD (7200 RPM), and I should either stick to 4.2.4 or buy a SSD to use 4.3.
I’m pretty fine with 4.2.4, but I saw somewhere in the documentation that it will be EOL in June '26, so it is not a viable solution in long term.
So my question is, is R4.3 definitely unusable on a HDD and require a SSD ? Will buying a SSD allow me for sure to run Qubes R4.3 fine on a T430, or might there be another incompatibility between my hardware and this version ?
I’ve been using r4.3 on a T430 with SSD and preloaded dispvms disabled for awhile. It is more sluggish than r4.2.4, but usable. Disabling preloaded dipvms wasn’t necessary, but I’m working to slim everything down (for example, minifying my firewalls and vpn qubes)
Ok, as I was back on R4.2.4 I reinstalled a 4.3 to give it a try. Disabling the disposal qubes preloading did not help much, I have the same result in both cases enabled and disabled.
However, I took advantage to do several installations and try different things, and I notice a slight improvement if I set sys-net being a DispVM instead of an AppVM (which is not my preferred option, but well…). In this case, all the sys-* qubes attempting to start at boot fail a 1 or 2 times but within 4-5 minutes sys-net manages to start and I have networking. Not ideal, but kind of usable (less than 4.2.4 though).
Ooooh very interesting, this may be the explanation for all my issues ! Too bad there is no fix foreseen nor postpone of R4.2 EOL… Seems like a end of support for my hardware then.
Edit: I’ve quickly tested adding cpufreq=xen on boot and result seems not that bad, I’ll reinstall Qubes one more time to get back a sys-net AppVM and I’ll see on the longer run.
Not sure if this is related, but a recent dom0 kernel update caused networking to fail after every suspend on my T430. I solved this by reverting to a debian-12-minimal template, installing the latest kernel (including the copy fail fixes in linux-image-amd64), and selecting the “provided by qube” kernel option for sys-net. Same set-up may work with debian-13, but I wanted to test an older kernel first and debian-12 still has a couple years in LTS.