Hello @unman,
Thank you for critiquing my reply. It was illuminating and helped rectify some of my ignorance on these matters, as well as properly address the topic in a way fitting for a Qubes environment. I am still very new to Qubes OS, both technically and conceptually, and it is that to which I attribute my error.
Briefly, I will explain the basis for my impressions in the context of your reply. I attempted to avoid any assumptions about VM proxying or additional Qubes VMs because @Sven’s original question made no mention of them, instead only asking about a comparison between two VM configurations. Perhaps I interpreted the question and in particular “Tor” too narrowly as being within the debian-minimal VM, which is entirely the fault of me not “thinking with Qubes.” This is why I mentioned Torifying updates from within the debian-minimal VM, since the much more elegant solutions you provided involved a more “Qubic” approach, which admittedly is the correct one (especially on Qubes OS!).
I have no comments about the rest of your explanation, only gratitude that you provided it for all of us to learn from.
Thanks,
John
P. S. It appears I’m late to the party. I’ve been very busy this week, so haven’t had the time to reply. Apologies for that. I wanted to acknowledge unman’s contribution, which I think does a much better job at addressing the topic than mine does, but I see this post is rather superfluous at this point. My fault for not finishing the thread before posting. 