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Comment by mushufasa | Hacker News Reader

When I've been on video calls with people using Qubes (admittedly rare, since few users), they inevitably can't get video or sound working or have to wait 5-10 minutes into the call for them to re-enable some system access to drivers for the window for the video call.

Not a problem for a developer who mostly communicates internally with a singular video call setup that you can optimize. But impossible for a founder, executive or salesperson that constantly has to be interacting with every video/call system in existence and doing screenshares and everything.

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There's no reason why everything should happen on the same machine, hardware is relatively cheap. Don't shit where you eat; don't do your web browsing / videoconferencing / exploration of interesting new tools on the same machine from which you have privileged access to sensitive things. Virtualization is an option, but just buying an extra laptop might be more straightforward.

I find myself frequently wanting to screen share the things that I’m actively working on. I suppose I could use HDMI capture and confine myself to sharing only full screens (which might suck for viewers at 4K res or require me to switch to 1080p on that screen), but for a lot of people there is perhaps more overlap between video conferencing and work than full segregation would support.

If you're on Linux, xpra might be an option here. Just stream the rendered window from your sensitive access computer to wherever you need to show it.

> Don't shit where you eat

1) Chromebook for web, social media. Separate profiles for personal trusted (banking), personal untrusted (browsing and social media), office/client work.

2) Separate laptop as VM host for development. Never pollute the host with third-party libraries or anything downloaded from the web, all that happens in disposable guests.

3) ssh and sftp from Chromebook to VMs as needed.

I’ve been thinking about something similar. I have an old laptop that I’ve been thinking of throwing proxmox or something similar on and just hosting VMs for my “daily driver” laptop to connect to

Video calls work fine for me. It's all about the Linux-compatible hardware. Here is a good list: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/community-recommended-computers....

Apart from that, on Qubes you need to manually choose which VM will have access to a microphone and camera, so it may take an additional minute (but not ten minutes!). Persistent connection to a chosen VM should also be possible.

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