I’m trying to get into QubeOS. Coming from Graphene on phone and its compartmentalizations, I expect an easy transtition. But holy shit, theres like a qube for everything: usb qube, network qube, file manager qubem…etc.
I’m still learning but find it difficult, not because of its features (I like to tinker with things) but because my hardware cannot handle the OS. I have an intel i7 12th Gen with 40GB RAM laptop. It runs blazingly fast on other distros but really suffocating in QubeOS. By “suffocating”, i meant just playing a video in Firefox can cause problems. Moving the Firefox window around can freeze the system.
Those who managed to switch to it, what was your hardware (laptop, desktop?) and how long did it take you?
I really like QubeOS, its controls are amazing. But the hardware just couldnt handle it.
Your hardware is actually more than capable. The stuttering in browsers is because Qubes no longer allows hardware acceleration. See https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/troubleshooting/media-troubleshooting.html
The other big OOTB problem is the default private storage size (i.e. /home/user) for VMs is 2GB, which is insanely small for any sort of interactive use, and needs to be bumped up just to enable a web browser’s cache to reach a reasonable size. Let alone being able to store a useful amount of data to be stored in the VM.
I think when you get past these few things, it’s more smooth sailing.
Pointless additional rambling that can be ignored:
I also at first really liked what QubesOS offers in terms of VM templating, and being able to have multiple AppVM share the same base OS template as more or less immutable (i.e. on next AppVM boot, any changes you made to the system partition in the AppVM are completely reverted to the template’s copy). So one can run multiple AppVMs without wasteful duplication of a unique system partition for each VM. This does mean one must boot up the template VM every time new system packages are needed for the AppVMs based on that template, installing the software, shutting down the template VM, then restarting the AppVM.
Ultimately I ended up just creating a bunch of Standalone VMs, and installed different software into each, rather than trying to come up with an efficient, combined template that had all the software I needed for all my app VMs. Less secure, but just more practical.
Getting used to the clipboard manager is another thing that just takes time, but eventually you get it down. All these things are there for security and I understand why they are there, but it definitely has a huge learning curve.