Qubes OS

Reader supplied reviews for Qubes OS Average rating 8.8 from 41 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Qubes OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 4.2.44.1.23.2.121.0 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 4.2.4 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-03-02 Votes: 5 I've been using Qubes OS as my daily driver since 2018. As someone without extensive technical expertise, I can confidently say that Qubes OS is accessible and usable for non-experts. The system's focus on security through compartmentalization has given me peace of mind, especially in today's digital landscape. Qubes OS isolates applications and data into separate virtual environments, or "qubes," ensuring that if one qube is compromised, others remain safe. This feature is invaluable for protecting sensitive information Despite its complex architecture, Qubes OS has become increasingly user-friendly with each release. The GUI unifies access to all qubes, making it easy to manage and switch between them. The Qubes OS community is actively working on enhancing the user experience. From better device handling to improved GUI elements, each update brings noticeable improvem. While Qubes OS may require some learning, it's surprisingly manageable for those without deep technical knowledge. The system's design ensures that you can start using it right away, with features like color-coded qubes helping to avoid mistakes Conclusion Qubes OS is not just for experts; it's a robust and secure operating system that anyone can use. Its unique security features combined with an improving user experience make it an excellent choice for those seeking enhanced protection without sacrificing usability. I highly recommend giving it a try if you're looking for a more secure computing environment. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 4.2.3 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-02-08 Votes: 3 I became interested in Qubes due to an interest in VMs and the desire to understand what it it was like to use a hypervisor. For me I can read about things all day long but until I actually attempt it myself I don't learn as much. When starting with Qubes, after an unmemorable installation, I had issues with frequent disconnects with my USB WiFi connection which made Qubes unusable. The WiFi worked fine on other distributions and after reading the Qubes forums and increasing the RAM allocations in the USB and NET qubes, there have been no more disconnects, yay! I'm running Qubes on an older Lenovo with SSD, 16G of RAM, and an intel video card and using it as my personal PC for now. I really like being able to spin up a VM with a distro I want to try, I've created an hvm qube called distro-test just for this purpose and have successfully installed a distro, wiped it and then tested the live medium without installing on several other distros. Currenlty I'm running a distro on the waiting list, CuerdOS. It's interesting to me that I can run xorg with qubes and wayland in a VM with no issues. I have installed Remmina for RDP and use it to remote into my Windows PC to run Eve online, I know it's possible to run Windows in a Qube container but there are so many updates to the Eve launcher I'm concerned I would be continually troubleshooting instead of playing the game to take the time to set it up. For a window manager I'm currently running xfce but was please there is an option to use i3 as well that I can switch to once I'm more familiar with the command line qubes commands. I've really come to like the Pantheon window manager lately and may look into implementing that at some point but really I can make xfce look nice enough for my purposes. For me the inter qube networking is a little strange. Each qube has it's own /32 IP with a shared gateway. I can understand how this would totally isolate traffic though so it works for this application. Each qube has it's own firewall settings but there is also a general firewall qube as well so everything looks secure by default from the networking perspective, Anyway thanks/props to the Qubes developers for this excellent OS. I expect I will be using it often in the future. :) Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 4.2.3 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-01-23 Votes: 3 I tried Qubes as an experiment expecting an unusable experience, but I came out realizing just how user friendly it is once you're used to the security minded quirks (took 2 months, been using for 4 months now). There is a GUI for most everything, VM management is a breeze. Disposable VMs are seamless. Updating is a single three click GUI. The core functionality worked right out of the box. Installing APT packages required no extra effort. The performance is surprising and the storage space is minimal. 7 VM's and only 47GB total disk space used. I ran into 3 issues so far. If the installation media is plugged into windows it gets corrupted (had to create using Linux). My laptop keyboard internally is USB (fixed by modifying Grub to allow USB during boot). I failed to get GPU passthrough working (Gaming is possible, but requires a lot of work). You will need to follow the wiki or forum post instructions to handle some situations, but if you can follow instruction, Qubes is less intimidating than "The world's most secure operating system" makes it out to be. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 41 reader reviews of Qubes OS...