Your experiences with Qubes as daily driver?

[balko]

@unman

We’ve talked before about how specific some of these are to you, and how
most users dont experience such problems.

But the topic starter @Jack asked everybody about their experience, so of course I am answering according to my experience and expectations.

@unman

Video playback is “good enough” for most users, on their hardware, as
you’ve been told by other users.

On the other hand there are people who are also not that happy by the absence of smoothness in youtube and other video players.

HD video playback on Qubes OS / older computers

There are a lot of reports on forum about not being able to play Youtube properly in Firefox without lags (as users are used to on GNU/Linux). I myself had to update less than 10-years old laptop to have reasonable youtube experience. I made a HCL that describes it, if you are interested I can find the link. HCL also includes some ways to improve situation a bit, like using smtube, so the issue was important for me. Please post you CPU model, I will check its speed according to websites that…

@unman

HVM with more than 1GB memory? Not a problem I recognise, or the users I
support.

I have it right now. 950 MiB is not a magic number, sometimes it is more (up to 2GiB probably) or even less. But it is a known (and multiple times reported) problem.
Related problem: Possible to Fix 2048MB RAM Limit for NVIDIA GPU Passthrough to HVM?

@unman

Windows use? No complaints from my users.

At least I have Alt+tab not working properly. It is kind of big deal. How your users overcome or work-around this? I have Alt+Tab in muscle memory and using Win10 qube is painful due to this bug:

Alt+Tab in the Windows qube is not working and problem of stuck modifiers (alt, ctrl, shift, win)

I installed Windows 10 with QWT as a standalone qube following community guides for R4.1: https://github.com/Qubes-Community/Contents/tree/master/docs/os/windows Everything is working surprisingly well. The only major problem I have is that Alt+Tab in the Windows 10 qube is conflicting with Alt+Tab in dom0. So, when I press Alt+Tab the Windows qube is change to other window in dom0, but the Alt key gets stuck inside Windows qube! So, when I return to Windows qube - everything is not working p…

@unman

Updates? A new updater is being worked on - you can reduce time and
bandwidth use by using a caching proxy - much discussed in this forum.

It is not about time of the process or bandwidth at all. It is about having multiple templates (different package sets and even Fedora version and updating all them by installing something. I manage it with self-made bash scripts.

@unman

Inter qube freezing? Entirely dependent on what you are doing.

I am tracking several issues on github about this. It exists. In my case it is about disk/usb or memory IO, or CPU. Even cursor starts being choppy, reproducible half of the time. On previous and older PC with Qubes OS 3.*-4.0 I was not having this bug at all.

Please, note, that the post was made not to criticize Qubes OS, but admit that there is a room for improvement. I am also trying to solve issues and publish solutions or work-arounds when possible (including github).