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Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

I installed 4.2 and was rather happy with the UI. The new GUI is better.

The gnome desktop will be important for adoption. XCFE looks ugly in comparison. Equally important is the ease of installation, hardware support, documentation for the bios settings, etc.

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XFCE looks very good, but it can look however you make it look. Most people are using it because of technical reasons, not based on how it looks, because they know how to dive deep under the surface of things.

> Most people are using it because of technical reasons, not based on how it looks

Plenty of us consider both. Qubes is the only game in town, and also competing with macOS 14 and Windows 11. These systems look good and are quite usable out of the box.

The take-it-or-leave-it attitude popular with some community members doesn't help much with retention either.

I already know the Qubes-specific bits (templates etc). I don't want to have to put a lot of work into set up just to make it usable visually.

I left Qubes as a daily driver because I could never get watching videos to be a pleasant experience. I believe this is due to the lack of GPU acceleration.

For the modest amount of developer resources they have, 4.2 appears to be a rather significant release.

I used Qubes a few years ago. I highly agree.

I found a very good looking theme for XFCE back then, but to make it usable I had to edit it myself and add the colored borders. It's been a while so no longer have all the files.

It needs to look good right out of the box to help adoption.

Perhaps try KDE?

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/kde/

> I left Qubes as a daily driver because I could never get watching videos to be a pleasant experience.

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improving-video-playback-speed/...

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hd-video-playback-on-qubes-os-o...

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improve-video-playback-performa...

and

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8962

Thanks. I was a Qubes user for years, across multiple computers. When things worked well, I found it to be easier than a regular Linux install to administer. Despite plenty of time and effort, there were some issues I was never able to resolve. I often ended up either using two computers or dual/triple booting, which tended to result in spending more time in the side that "just works".

How is your personal experience now? Does youtube in a browser work well for you? How about watching a movie saved locally?

You should ask for help on the forums. In general, the Community always finds a way to solve users' problems.

I do not watch movies or Youtube very often, but it seems to be working fine.

personally I'm obsessed with the Chicago95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Can you switch to gnome for dom0? I thought KDE was the alternative.

Also:

>Another interesting change with this release the use of Xfce editions for Fedora and Debian instead of GNOME to reduce memory usage and provide a better selection of default applications. Marek Marczykowski-Górecki said that Fedora's GNOME template has too many ""problematic"" packages that ""either conflict with something or simply don't work with our GUI agent"".

I prefer Xfce FWIW.

I generally use i3 for dom0 on my qubes boxes. It works great. There is generally support for a few different options in dom0 but clearly since dom0 is special you need to be mindful of reducing the software footprint as much as possible in my view.

I can see that reasoning but also have no idea how much testing/fuzzing/etc. i3 gets compared to Xfce?

Gnome is terrible. I will choose either KDE or XFCE any day.

> The gnome desktop will be important for adoption

Gnome is too opinionated to adjust it for Qubes: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1806#issuecom...

However you can easily install KDE.

Does Xfce work on Wayland? I would imagine qubes would either use wayland or not provide any windows management if they're focused on security. As I understand it, X11 has a lot of big security vulnerabilities that Wayland fixes, but not having any of that code or functionality to review makes it a lot easier to secure. Like the Alpine mentality.

Not yet, but they are working on switching over.

It's worth trying to understand the qubes security model a bit because it's very different from a normal distro. Essentially dom0 runs the xen hypervisor and then all your "actual work" gets run in various sandboxed vms which are highly protected. Normal vms have the system directories wipe and reset on reboot and there are also transient "tempvms" that literally get completely burned down and have no sideeffects. You can lock down which hardware is accessible from which vms as well as very finegrained control of things like network traffic (including ingress and egress). Clipboard is not shared between vms (although there are ways to explicitly choose to do crossvm cut and paste) and other copying or sharing between vms is also very tightly controlled.

In that context, security vulnerabilities in X11 don't have the same impact as they would in a normal distro. User processes running in a VM don't have the ability to exploit a problem in X11.

Go here https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/ and scroll down to "How does Qubes OS provide security?" to understand better.

However switching to Wayland will improve performance: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3366

For sure. I would really like them to do it.

As someone in the past that advocated for GNOME, and Gtkmm, with articles written on The C/C++ Users Journal, the less I have to touch GNOME the better.

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