I’ve seen a few VPN guides (like WireGuard, Mullvad, and Proton) that use Debian or Fedora templates. These setups can be pretty minimal and use around 400 MB on a Debian 12 minimal template, but I think we can make them even lighter.
I found this project:
MirageVPN is based on Mirage OS. There is a firewall variant of MirageOS that only uses about 64 MB, so MirageVPN could be an amazing solution, since it supports QubesOS too. The only downside is that it uses OpenVPN. @palainp are there maybe ideas to implement wireguard in the future?
I’m thinking about using an Alpine template since it’s very lightweight too. Does anyone have ideas for easily setting up a VPN on a lightweight template? Thanks!
You need l some gtk environment for vpn icon in toolbar and for network manager.
Also qubes-core-agent-networking.
Dunno what else.
For now I have ProtonVPN on full fedora template but will try to do it on minimal.
I think wireguard is implemented inside the linux kernel so I think you only need wg-tools. I personally don’t care about the icons, and yes, qubes networking has to work.
If you want more light weight, you can get Debian down to about 250 MB and not even use a GUI in it.
If you want to alter anything, just open the console and change what needs to be changed.
Or else set it up for display as VNC, this way from Domain-0 you can VNC to it.
This means you can do whatever you want.
I’ve got multiple versions that I have for unix, and some are only 40 MB in size and can do it all.
So as long as things are set up correctly, yes, you can do a lot.
I would enjoy documentation (even terse) on how you did this. I did some additional minimalizing on a debian minimal, but was distracted by other tasks