Video Tutorial

User Support
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Can someone on the Qubes team do some indepth video tutorials on current versions of Qubes that would help new users to Qubes?

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Hi @glowinthedark, welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

This has been discussed already quite a few times in this forum. Even though new ideas get floated each time, the responses usually end up being more or less the same.

Usually it boils down to the following:

  • Video tutorials do exist
    • But they are LONG :roll_eyes: (some of the video tutorials on YouTube are upwards of three hours with no chapter markings on the videos…)
    • They are usually created by:
      • The community - usually in their own spare time
        • These videos are usually incredibly detailed, because they are passionate about the subject matter
          • This can sometimes be a turn-off to some audiences
        • Because of the flexibility of Qubes OS, they will often have their own bias on how to do things
          • This means that they’ll usually only showcase one solution to achieve an outcome,
      • Someone who doesn’t fully understand/utilize Qubes OS to its full potential
        • For many many reasons
      • YouTubers wanting ad revenue
        • “I picked this up, played with it for a few seconds, and it didn’t do anything, so I threw it away, because it was boring”
  • It’s very difficult for someone to “sink their teeth” into Qubes OS without having at least a working knowledge of some basic computing principles and accompanying subject matter
    • It’s very difficult to explain to someone what Whonix is if they don’t know what Tor is, let alone get them to see the value in it
    • “Ah…virtualization…that’s good, right…?” :expressionless:
  • When people ask for demonstration videos, they often have a very specific thing that they want to see, and are not interested in seeing anything else
    • Because of this, it’s often very difficult to create such videos, let alone make them engaging enough to watch until the end…

What specifically would you want to see in an in-depth video?

You must have some ideas in your head about what you’d like to see in a video. I mean, everyone has a rough idea in their mind, but I bet you have some specific use cases in your mind as well, and I’d love to know about them.

The usual things people do are:

  • Qubes OS install and initial setup
  • Where everything is on the XFCE desktop
  • Starting and shutting down qubes
  • Copying/Moving files between qubes
  • The colored windows
  • The Qubes Global Config
  • USB passthrough
  • Qube settings

qubes-onboarding-tutorial

The amazing @deeplow has also created this:

and it deserves a lot more exposure than it has received, because it’s really good. :slight_smile:

DISCLAIMER:

  • Even though is it pretty polished now, it is still a work-in-progress.
  • It requires a “custom environment” to function properly
    • The interactive tutorial needs to be notified when the user has completed the tutorial steps correctly, so it can provide feedback; and the vanilla version of the File Manager and Qubes Menu currently don’t have that sort of functionality (yet…)
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When explaining about Qubes to new users, I usually start with a joke: if you want “to marry” Qubes, you’d need “virgin” computer. Just like in the old days…

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I’ve been meaning to do more video tutorials. I even recorded them, but I’m unfortunately a perfectionist and they were not up to my standards. And then I accidentally installed over my Qubes SSD for thr video editing machine (I was trying to get GPU passthrough working on 4.2 and thought I had switched to the blank SSD – I hadn’t :grimacing:). Ironically this was right after publishing a video on backups. I was not backing up that machine because with 1TB + disk space it starts becoming a big burden.

But I’ll get around to doing them again some time.

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But I can share some of what I learned:

  • structuring a good tutorial takes time
  • recording takes a lot of time
  • time video editing inversely proportional to how good you are at explaining yourself in front of a microphone (or camera)
  • publishing takes courage

In conclusion, it takes quite a lot of time and courage (at least for me). Regular youtuber people have all of these processes polished and probably can do it much much faster. But following what @alzer89 said, there’s a reason why youtubers don’t go deep into Qubes. – because that also takes a lot of time. Mostly unmonitized time. And the intersection of both is very rare.

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