I’m curious whats your reasoning behind using Qubes OS. Here is mine:
My company handles a lot of ssh root@, and I want to handle this responsibility reasonably securely
The whole setup and design is quite appealing to me as a sys admin. Pretty much most of the setup just makes sense to me, like how its approached and implemented
I love that I can run different Linux distros and windows (which I pretty much never run unless I build a Qubes setup for a customer). I mostly run Debian VMs.
It comes with a tor browser thats configured pretty nicely, and makes it super easy to just use the tor browser for everything, which is nice, as this way most of what I google isn’t tracked. I pretty much google “linux stuff” all day, being a sys admin of course, but I just don’t need to have a permanent record of all that associated to my person. The stupid captchas are super annoying though but tor got better and faster x)
I can’t help myself but mess with automating my qubes installation, which is tons of fun and (for myself) not really required, and costs lots of time x) “messing with qubes” is a bit of a hobby.
had a long standing history of reinstalling windows every other week in the early 2000s
switched to linux on and off back then too, tried multiboot…
then had an apple laptop for a few years and hardware issues like not soldered graphic chips drove me away to this company…
not sure if i saw a talk from joanna or what introduced qubes to me, but i was drawn to the concept, the more i understood it. an OS that could do so much more then just one and maybe retire my tinfoil (surveillance) hat a little (:
now i am just so glad to have it. to compartmentalize my volunteering in a political party, my job which would else require another laptop, my private life and its aspects like socialmedia, signal, banking, homeserver-maintenance into different machines and feel reasonably safe about it
basically because Linux is far too trusting and has a relatively huge attack surface that’s being exploited too often, so it needs something to contain it (and not just another Linux).
If Qubes didn’t exist, I’d be spending a lot more money on home networking and a lot more time on custom design and maintenance, and I’d still be uncomfortable about the hardware I’d have to trust.
Having good out-of-the-box UX around compartmentalization+Tor is a big plus, too.
I came to it because of (1) passing a threshold of disaffection with the slow boiled frog loss of online privacy, (2) a growing sense of vulnerability, that even careful use of a computer is to invite risk of compromise, likely invisible until it’s too late, (3) a belief that it’s only going to get worse out there.
I’ve stayed with it because Qubes turns out to be an excellent project management tool.
I know exactly how that feels. I was so automated moving from 4.1 to 4.2 was mostly painless (except for renaming the menu files so as to have _d in qube names).
I’m now 65 years old and retired from my former career as cofounder of a small software company. I started using Qubes OS more than four years ago after watching a presentation held by Joanna Rutkowska on YouTube. Since Version 4.0 this is my “daily driver” OS on my personal laptop.
In 2020 I started a german language chat group about Qubes OS on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @QubesOS_user_de
My personal motivation to use Qubes OS is the ease of virtualization: It is rather simple and fast to create copies of virtual computers, install some additional software packages, tinker with configuration options and do a lot of things for testing that would be otherwise more risky or much more time consuming to restore to the original state. Qubes OS makes it easier to migrate stuff to new releases of Debian or Fedora: Simply clone the template of the new version, install your individual set of software packages in this cloned template and afterwards create a test clone of your application qube and switch this test qube to the new version template. After successful testing of your stuff with the new version it is easy to remove this test qube and switch the original app qube to the new template.
As a consultant/trainer and (part-time) admin in our office and data center, I used to have three laptops. One for admin stuff and office work, one for customer support and a “private” one for research etc. And those three weren’t really enough, because I had to use multiple accounts with different keys/ids, I had to encrypt and transfer/export all that customer data to encrypted storage over and over again, wipe things afterwards, and all that while working on different projects. I had to take two (sometimes three) laptops to work, not to mention encrypted drives, multiple smart cards, etc. I had to set up some “forensic” VMs (I mainly used virtualbox or bhyve) when examining “external data” etc.
When I discovered Qubes, my life went back to “normal”. Customer privacy and business security by strict separation of data pools, different multi-level access rights, etc. became easy to implement and maintain. Qubes does not require a lot of customization and tinkering, it works almost out of the box. And it even gave me Whonix and “open in disposable” on top of all that.
Now that there is “better hardware” (still not really open hardware, you have to admit), it has become even more convenient. My Qubes certified nv41 with coreboot/heads and NK3 is my all-in-one mobile computing device. (And saves a lot of hassle … day by day …)
