Setting up a debloated templates?

User Support
1

My laptop broke down so now I am stack with pretty old hardware to use qubes effectively, I was going to use liteqube but I dont like using scripts I haven’t read or wrote myself and it will take too long to do so, thats mostly because I want full control not distrust to liteqube itself tbh

If I install qubes-vm-recommended on a minimal template and then did something like “systemctl list-units --type=service | grep qubes | xargs -I{} systemctl enable {}” wourld there be any difference between the minimal and the full templates at that point? Could i consider that “debloated”?

Honestly it is either that, taking my time to compile alpine packages and follow the unofficial guide from the dev or trusting the alpine dev and pulling his packages at this point, waiting for 20’ each boot to use my system is horrible i tell ya, especially when I wanna use i2p and I have to wait another 10-30 to do so after that

2

I can’t answer your questions, but perhaps you could save more RAM by using Mirage Firewall: Mirage-firewall memory assignment

3

I cannot consider that, I dont use sys-firewall the orthodox way, I actually use it for other things like dns redirects and some other staff

4

I am not altogether clear on what you are trying to do, or why. I feel
that there is some crucial piece of information that I am missing.

As to your question, you will undoubtedly have a smaller template. I
would guess that you will save about 3.5GB space. The principal templates
have software recommended for Xfce or Gnome, and you will not have
that. There are a few other packages in the main templates that you will
be lacking. Whether you need everything in qubes-vm-recommended is
a matter for you.

If you were to salt your system, you could (relatively) quickly rebuild
all or part of it on to a different machine. Now might be a time to
think about doing that.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team. When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.
5

In general the whole debloating thing was not about the space it would save but the ram and cpu-cycles, I just finished changing every template into a minimal one(except vault and a few standalonevms that I havent got arrount to) and it notably saves me a lot of both cpu-cycles and ram

I was able to drop my personal vm down from 4GB to 2GB without a problem while still running brave
My dns,firewall and sys-net vms are running at sub 400mb ram saving me about 200mb each
My sys-whonix down by 800mb(from 1.5 to 800 since otherwise it freezes itself non-stop)
and my whonix workstations from 4b to 1.5ish(still testing)

And thats not even half of it, vms boot about 8 times faster, and update about 4-5 times faster

Honestly a great experiance, I was living a hell for a month now or so until I did this, and I have to say everything also runs smoother, probably because of the cpu-cycles that I used to waste.

Edit: I honestly have enough ram saved now that I am even considering to setup a preloaded disposable for whonix

6

Great - Have you reduced the amount set aside for dom0?
I find you can easily reduce this to 2GB, with minimal impact on
performance. YMMV.
In grub.cfg, set dom0_mem_max in multiboot2.

When you have found the right value for you set it under
/etc/default/grub

@qubist has a project to further minimise debian templates. You can find
that in the Forum.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.

7

I always had dom0_mem_max to 2gb

Ill also keep that project in mind thanks

8

My sys-whonix down by 800mb(from 1.5 to 800 since otherwise it freezes itself non-stop)

You are assigning too much ram for sys-whonix. If your sys-whonix is freezing then its bloated or someother issue. First check how much bloated it is and if you find it bloated you need to debloat it. Keep in mind if sys-whonix is compromised the whole anonymity is over.

My dns,firewall and sys-net vms are running at sub 400mb ram saving me about 200mb each

These values are also quite a bit high i don’t know why you are assigning tons of ram to the service VMs.

9

My dns,firewall and sys-net vms are running at sub 400mb ram saving me about 200mb each

No you can even go further like 1664 MB this is the lowest i found if you go below this Qubes OS will not start. No major performance impact at all with this. During luks decryption it takes sometime other than that i found no issues at all.

10

You’ll have a much leaner template than full/xfce ones. That’s how I set up my minimal templates so that using them as sys-* is not a pain and they still use very little RAM, storage and CPU cycles.