Templates for Templates

[otter2]

It would be almost as cool to have as nested virtualization.

What would you like to see improved in Qubes OS?:

@otter2

• Be able to have a template tree. This seems more like sci-fi to me, but it would be really cool to have a template based on a template which differ by one additional not-so-trusted app installed. This would greatly decrease the space required to operate qubes. Dedup may be an alternative to this.
• Snapshot tree. It should be possible to work with snapshots via gui. I want to be able to version-control my vms and revert to any of manually saved states on a whim instead of cloning them like a caveman. Please throw a link at me if this already exists and I am just unaware of it.

Very nice note on the topic by alzer89:

@alzer89

But I do agree with you that there are benefits to be had from “delta templates” or “snapshots” if you will, if done right, with no compromises as far as security/integrity goes.

It would allow you to stack multiple templates on top of each other, before you overlay the qube. You could even have a single application in a template, and overlay that application (and all it’s /lib, /etc, /usr, and /opt files) across an OS template, allowing you to (potentially) hot-swap the application onto a different OS, with all its configuration intact.

Yes, there’s a lot in this that can go wrong (trust me, I realised more the more I wrote it), but that’s the point that I’m trying to make. The devs have definitely thought about cool ideas like this, realised the fact that a cool idea takes a lot of time to become a solid one, and have opted to keep it simple, and build incrementally from there.

For every solid idea, there are at least 30 other cool ideas of a Qubes dev’s machine, in various states of functionality