Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

FWIW: just over half of Latacora uses Qubes on a daily basis. We do that because "Xen VM" is a pretty great boundary; it allows me to have totally separate client environments with the convenience of a single laptop. (We've had a client have us use their endpoint before; while I generally like that client, we won't be doing that again :-))

It's not flawless. Sometimes switching to a big screen or moving USB devices between VMs is wonky... but the bottom line is I haven't booted my MacBook Pro for work in 2018. We stopped using MBPs because the then-current now one-minor-rev old generation is trash; all of them broke, and that was unacceptable, so I have a Lenovo (again).

Happy to answer questions about Qubes.

FWIW: not worried about Qubes' future. As Joanna herself points out in the blog post: Marek has been doing most of the technical day to day stuff for a while now, and Qubes has been doing just fine. I'm really thankful for the work Joanna has done in making Qubes happen and hope her new endeavors are everything she wants them to be :)

What's hardware compatibility like? Did/do you struggle to find good portable machines to run Qubes on with solid wireless/bluetooth support?

As somebody whose (trash) recently-current MBP just spent the weekend with Apple due to a display failure, I'm evaluating my options.

I have a T470 -- at the time the most recent T-series 14" Thinkpad. Everything pretty much worked fine? But that's just one data point. Perhaps if they're super new, you'll run into more issues. dom0 is hyperconservative with updates, so maybe you'll need to run testing-grade stuff to get all your hardware to work properly.

I think I had an issue with WiFi + suspend/resume but that was easy to fix, and fixed by default now. (It involves reloading the driver after resume -- that's automatic now but the setting lives in a config file.)

For what its worth the T4x0(s) series has been very good for Linux in general. We've been hopping the odd numbers every other year.

Bluetooth needs futzing around with in Qubes, for sure. It took me a while to figure out how to get my Bluetooth devices to pair/connect correctly and to persist that through reboots.

have you used it with a docking station and multiple screens? if so what was your experience?

do you think Qubes will complete their effort with a live USB with persistence? what would be your opinion on using that?

Yes, docking station + 4k@60Hz + builtin laptop screen. Works fine, though there's an annoying bug where occasionally the updated screen sizes won't be reflected properly on the secondary screen. Reboot works as a workaround, I hear there's a less annoying one but I haven't tried it myself. So: not perfect, but not bad enough for me to throw it out :-)

Re: LiveUSB; I see the point for Tails. I don't see the point for Qubes. Is it "easy to try out"? Because the whole TemplateVM thing seems pretty core to how Qubes works and

How do you mean? There's a bug where the screen size inside the VM is not updated properly due to small allocation of VMEM for the graphics. It's a one line fix :)

What about performance of VMs that spans many cores? At work I need to compile a huge C++ codebase and it is important to utilize all the cores and almost all RAM.

From my use of Qubes:

* RAM hit is pretty big. 16gb was pretty much necessary for any type of work.

* CPU hit is decent. In Qubes, one of the applications I'm working on would build in 40s, on a "regular" OS it would take 20s.

The CPU hit is probably more variable and depends on many factors.

FWIW even though I really liked Qubes, I eventually moved away from it because maintaining the system took up a bit too much of my time. For the most part it "just works" (and huge props to the Qubes team for that!), but for example I had trouble upgrading my images at some point, which messed things up. I had backups (Qubes has a decent backup tool for which I had a bash script), but that was kind of the breaking point - I felt I had spent too much time futzing around with things. I think I used it for ~6 months. It's definitely worth trying out if you have the nerve to deal with those kinds of problems.

Agreed on the RAM bit. I have 32GB and it's sufficient. But keep in mind we have N customers, all with Slack, so our use cases are probably a little out of the ordinary.

How is performance? My experience with normal VMs has always been that CPU performance is fine but doing anything with a GUI is very annoyingly slow/laggy.

I'd generally agree (CPU perf fine, GPU perf noticeably worse), but it's honestly fine for normal browser/editor use, even on my 4k@60Hz display. I do stuff like (digitally) sign documents and mild Inkscape/GIMP work. I wouldn't use it as a CAD machine.

> We've had a client have us use their endpoint before

What does that mean?

Endpoint means managed laptop in this context :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com