Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

Joanna's (Qubes OS Founder) blog [1] is a gold mine when it comes to hardware-software boundary security. Especially "State considered harmful" [2] and "x86 considered harmful" [3] papers are eye-openers. [1] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/ [2] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.p... [3] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf

I’m using this as a daily driver. It’s usable and the security benefits are definitely important when working with multiple security domains (separate clients each with their own confidential data and third-party dependencies, where you don’t want one client’s malicious NPM dependency affecting the other). However, there are cons. It’s only really usable in a stationary environment; it completely kills battery life and even basic tasks such as (non-HD) video display maxes out a single CPU core so it’s just…

I used it when I worked as a hiring manager. For this task it is ideal. All the behavioral security measures, like only to open attachments from people you trust, break down when your job description is basically to figure out who you can trust. Qubes comes with a "Convert to trusted PDF" out of the box. Joanna Rutkowska explained how it works under the hood pretty nicely[1]. The tldr is that it is very thorough. With Qubes it is…

Have used it for several months as my daily OS and dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT) and bad battery management. Due to software rendering the overall systems perfmance also dropped. So I cannot recommend it for people with high requirements on graphics and battery duration. Besides that it was an interesting and good experience. I think it would be good to make it possible to…