What’s the first things you should do when getting qubes

General Discussion
1

I just bought my first lenovo x1 carbon i7 16gb ram and I am currently downloading qubes for the first time. Are their any settings I should change or anything I should do first?

2

Hi @QubesNewbs1, welcome to our community!

I know you are excited and just want to “dive in”, but you will save yourself a lot of time and frustration if you can spend maybe an hour reading some pages of the Qubes OS documentation.

Especially these pages:

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My suggested super-short introduction:

When you boot into Qubes OS for the first time, you will have the following virtual machines for your service. Sys-net contains drivers for your WiFi card and connects to the network, so it’s untrusted by default (don’t run Firefox there!). Sys-firewall protects you from DMA attacks and allows to use the “Firewall rules” in the Settings of other qubes. Sys-whonix provides Tor connection to anon-whonix (in which you should run Tor browser). All connected usb devices go to sys-usb qube by default, to protect you from USB attacks. If you need to connect them to other qubes, use Qubes Devices widget. Vault qube has no network by default, making it a good place to store your secrets. With personal and work qubes you can separate your private and working lives by running related things in them. See this for an example.

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So is tor the main suggested browser for qubes then? I have been using duck duck go for the last couple months.

5

Just started thank you

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Tor is suggested for anonymous browsing (using anon-whonix qube). Otherwise Firefox is the default in all other qubes, like personal and work.

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Also good to start (and just watch :eyes: ): Video tours | Qubes OS

I can just confirm Sven’s suggestions, you need to understand the basics of Qubes OS. What is a template, where and how to install software, how to connect devices … what can / can’t / should / shouldn’t you do in dom0.

Additionally, I would suggest you to see your first installation as sandbox. Play around with the basics and see how far you can go. Step-by-step you will like it more and more :heartpulse:

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Gotcha thank you

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Good info thanks I didn’t think about a sandbox