I still look at the Windows 7 seamless mode screenshots on QubesOS documentation with a sense of yearning. It must’ve been really cool to be able to use Windows 7 in seamless way in QubesOS.
Is such a thing possible in the near future with Windows 11? Or has windows 11 made some breaking changes to its OS that the seamless mode won’t be working in QubesOS, and we will have to use HVM Standalones with Win11?
“Must have been” is not what I’d say myself - seamless mode still works for Windows 7.
Yes, please see here:
Windows 7/11 compatibility (11 seems to mostly work without issues)
It’s a matter of implementation. The old QWT graphics-related stuff, that works on my end, appear to just be incompatible with the WDDM version shipped with Windows 8 and newer.
What’s the “graphics-related stuff” contain in this context? Is this GPU-passthrough? Can’t you watch videos (or something) under Windows 8+ in QubesOS now?
I’d rather answer, what’s the “graphics-related stuff, that works on my end” I wrote about.
Without diving deep into technical terms, it’s the component, that makes seamless mode work as part of my Windows 7 AppVMs.
It could be the Windows driver, the GUI agent, or something else, about which I’m not sure, but hinted as part of the “Opening the source and the future” section of this article.
Can you be more specific and maybe give concrete examples on:
Seamsless mode for MS Office windows is impossible without additional questionable (from the security perspective) tweaks (on the window manager level MS Office apps are NOT single windows but rather weird composites that tell wm not to draw intermediate borders. Qubes forces those borders around them and everything gets very ugly)