Errata: I forgot to tell you what Qubes OS is: Qubes OS is a reasonably secure OS, it is based on Xen hypervisor and uses virtual machines to create a compartmentalized "qube" to keep your data and your activities private.
Been using qubes for a good month now and honestly don't see myself going back, I just find it so intuitive to use. Independent of the security aspect being able to segment off different parts of my digital life just makes sense. And having access to all the operating systems I use on a regular basis as a dev (fedora, debian, whonix, arch) at a moment's notice is a convenience I don't know if I can give up now that I've adapted to the qubes workflow.
While there are many other approaches, like VMs, Qubes just makes it convenient. However, I'm done with distro hopping for now and sticking with KDE Neon after using Arch & Manjaro for a long while.
Some years ago I tried Qubes, and thought it was really neat, I like the design in principle, but there are three main reasons I really couldn't stick with it: 1) Some of the overhead (at least at that time on that machine) was a bit much, 2) Fedora as a base is kind of a pain imo, and 3) Updates to software were much too far behind upstream
Yes and they are trying to address the first item, as for the other two, maybe in time they will fix those by allowing more choice in the base OS, but have not heard if they will or not, as for 3, I doubt that will ever be addressed, security OS usually lag behind a little bit
I think, I use a setup, that is comparable with Quebes. I moved all my applications to my 6 main Virtualbox VMs (4x Ubuntu and 2x Windows). All VM are stored on OpenZFS and I take a snapshot and a backup each week. The Host OS and all VMs except one are closed for inbound traffic. The Host OS is a minimal install of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Currently I have 2 VMs running; - Xubuntu 22.04 LTS for all my communication apps (Email; WhatsApp; Transmission; KDE-Connect etc.). This one has some open ports. - Ubuntu 16.04 ESM encrypted by Virtualbox, used for my financial stuff. It runs the latest stable snaps of Firefox and LibreOffice. In 2022 I had two attacks, one through the browser of my Host OS and one through an email from an old colleague. In both cases I could roll back to the appropriate snapshot and rerun the updates. Afterwards I moved to a two step verification. I use VBox shared data and that is probably the weakest part, but I do have 2 backups with some months of snapshots of that shared data. Note that all my financial data is stored locally on the encrypted virtual disk of Ubuntu 16.04 ESM. What would be the advantage of moving to Quebes? The immutability or is there more? I would loose my freedom, now I could move the usage of some of my Apps to a Fedora 37 VM, which I have installed out of curiosity since the days of Fedora 33.
if you have something that's working for you then stay with that, Qubes might be overkill for what you are doing, Bert. Qubes is always going to lag behind Fedora by 6 months or more because of the extra development and testing they do.
just read architecture design docs on qubeos - about problems and how they trying to solve them. i dont think many people around can make such complex work.
I've played with Qubes a few times over the last few years and found it to be very interesting. The one thing for me that causes concern is the Fedora template. As of the time of this comment Fedora 36 is end of life in 4 months in mid May. I wonder about that, as Fedora has a 1 year cycle and I thought that a different distro, with a longer life span might be more appropriate for dom 0.
Have not tried Qubes, have been using Fedora for about 15 years or so. Even though Fedora's in place update works very well. I find every once in a while (3 - 4 versions) you should backup your /home directory, then nuke everything, install fresh and restore your home directory.
OpenMandriva Rome, a new rolling release has just landed. Please review it? Comes in KDE Plasma and Gnome versions.... Thankyou for the awesome content!!!!
An interesting OS for sure DJ. A bit too confined for what I do. However, having worked in networks and servers for many years, I have a healthy dose of professional paranoia, so I view source of emails and webpages if I have even the slightest hint that something could be a problem. I had one come in this morning, claiming to be an eFax, when I examined the details, it was a blurry tiny image, and then an HTML page with JavaScript to send you to a Russian website. I see some strange stuff come in, as an administrator for servers, networks and domains.
Errata: I forgot to tell you what Qubes OS is: Qubes OS is a reasonably secure OS, it is based on Xen hypervisor and uses virtual machines to create a compartmentalized "qube" to keep your data and your activities private.
I’m absolutely brand new to learning LINUX ~ is this the best OS for me ?
Been using qubes for a good month now and honestly don't see myself going back, I just find it so intuitive to use. Independent of the security aspect being able to segment off different parts of my digital life just makes sense. And having access to all the operating systems I use on a regular basis as a dev (fedora, debian, whonix, arch) at a moment's notice is a convenience I don't know if I can give up now that I've adapted to the qubes workflow.
Thank you for this video. I always come back to learn new stuff. Always nice to see you passionate about new and older technologies.
While there are many other approaches, like VMs, Qubes just makes it convenient. However, I'm done with distro hopping for now and sticking with KDE Neon after using Arch & Manjaro for a long while.
Some years ago I tried Qubes, and thought it was really neat, I like the design in principle, but there are three main reasons I really couldn't stick with it: 1) Some of the overhead (at least at that time on that machine) was a bit much, 2) Fedora as a base is kind of a pain imo, and 3) Updates to software were much too far behind upstream
Yes and they are trying to address the first item, as for the other two, maybe in time they will fix those by allowing more choice in the base OS, but have not heard if they will or not, as for 3, I doubt that will ever be addressed, security OS usually lag behind a little bit
Thanks for another very interesting video.
glad you found it interesting
I think, I use a setup, that is comparable with Quebes. I moved all my applications to my 6 main Virtualbox VMs (4x Ubuntu and 2x Windows). All VM are stored on OpenZFS and I take a snapshot and a backup each week. The Host OS and all VMs except one are closed for inbound traffic. The Host OS is a minimal install of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Currently I have 2 VMs running;
- Xubuntu 22.04 LTS for all my communication apps (Email; WhatsApp; Transmission; KDE-Connect etc.). This one has some open ports.
- Ubuntu 16.04 ESM encrypted by Virtualbox, used for my financial stuff. It runs the latest stable snaps of Firefox and LibreOffice.
In 2022 I had two attacks, one through the browser of my Host OS and one through an email from an old colleague. In both cases I could roll back to the appropriate snapshot and rerun the updates. Afterwards I moved to a two step verification. I use VBox shared data and that is probably the weakest part, but I do have 2 backups with some months of snapshots of that shared data. Note that all my financial data is stored locally on the encrypted virtual disk of Ubuntu 16.04 ESM.
What would be the advantage of moving to Quebes? The immutability or is there more? I would loose my freedom, now I could move the usage of some of my Apps to a Fedora 37 VM, which I have installed out of curiosity since the days of Fedora 33.
if you have something that's working for you then stay with that, Qubes might be overkill for what you are doing, Bert. Qubes is always going to lag behind Fedora by 6 months or more because of the extra development and testing they do.
When you said you had two attacks in 2022, could you elaborate? What happened that triggered you to rollback?
just read architecture design docs on qubeos - about problems and how they trying to solve them. i dont think many people around can make such complex work.
I've played with Qubes a few times over the last few years and found it to be very interesting. The one thing for me that causes concern is the Fedora template. As of the time of this comment Fedora 36 is end of life in 4 months in mid May. I wonder about that, as Fedora has a 1 year cycle and I thought that a different distro, with a longer life span might be more appropriate for dom 0.
They have debian templates.
Have not tried Qubes, have been using Fedora for about 15 years or so. Even though Fedora's in place update works very well. I find every once in a while (3 - 4 versions)
you should backup your /home directory, then nuke everything, install fresh and restore your home directory.
I still do that on major upgrades, good to clean out all the cruft occasionally and partially removed package dependencies
OpenMandriva Rome, a new rolling release has just landed. Please review it? Comes in KDE Plasma and Gnome versions.... Thankyou for the awesome content!!!!
Been along time since I've played with Mandriva will check it out
An interesting OS for sure DJ. A bit too confined for what I do. However, having worked in networks and servers for many years, I have a healthy dose of professional paranoia, so I view source of emails and webpages if I have even the slightest hint that something could be a problem. I had one come in this morning, claiming to be an eFax, when I examined the details, it was a blurry tiny image, and then an HTML page with JavaScript to send you to a Russian website. I see some strange stuff come in, as an administrator for servers, networks and domains.
Wow, I can relate to the paranoia on privacy and security I have it too
I watched the first few minutes of this, but you never explain what this OS is because I guess everyone already knows.
th-cam.com/video/yrDo0q9qSXs/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/0-YX_xhs2CA/w-d-xo.html
Opps you are right, I added that info to the video description and an Errata comment on the video, thanks for catching that sazma