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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

I run GNOME/Wayland on my host and do 100% of my computing inside fully-virtualized VMs running xfce, an actually useful desktop environment. In this way, GNOME 3 actually excels because it's completely void of features and is thus mostly invisible.

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Why do that rather just run Xfce?

* Company image

* Snapshots

* Portability

* Isolation

Just a few things i could come up with as valid reasons someone would want to do this.

All of the things sister comment listed and more.

* Compartmentalization

* Layered defense

* Windows is not allowed to touch my bare metal

* Having development images for work, play, etc.

* Easy migration

* Configuring multiple separate environments from one control node

* Accessing my virtual machines over the wire using QEMU on my laptops

* Being able to take a system crash without losing other running contexts.

* Maintaining host-level logical volume management and snapshots while guests retain a simplified partioning layout, with separate images for easy migration of `/home` and `/usr/local`

* Advanced firewall configurations

etc.

Out of interest are you doing this using Qubes? And why?

I used to, but my requirements evolved out of Qubes and I ended up replicating most of the Qubes environment over KVM.

Are you using alternatives to Qubes tools such as the secure clipboard (qvm-copy-to-vm), or just using a lower security setup?

I have some of my own tooling in place, for example with secure clipboard, I have disabled clipboard sharing between VMs and instead wrote host-level ssh+xclip scripts which I hotkeyed.

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