Qubes OS saved me, once again. On it, Zoom only has the access to an empty VM and no access to the clipboard.
Proxmox uses KVM, and is easy to configure a VM to make the guest think it's on bare metal.
In the proprietary software space, a LOT of things run badly or refuse to run, or license stupidity with a guest OS. So for me, spoofing bare metal is an essential part of running ilk like Windows and proprietary apps. And also, school remote testing garbage.
It also passes obvious "Xen emulated drive", and similar for all hardware interfaces.
Passes CPUID.
Can't stop any of this with Qubes/Xen. But is trivial with Proxmox/KVM.
Honestly, I wish there was a Qubes/KVM variant. It would fix every complaint, and enable running potentially malicious software (MS windows) and lie to it regarding hardware interfaces.
Relayed Issue: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051
The normal qube model of template OS vms + ephemeral app overlays makes it a cinch to troubleshoot complex issues because you can scribble all over the VM (e.g. go ahead, monkey patch your system LIBC if you want!) and all those changes will be gone when you restart the VM. Once you do find a solution you like, you can apply it cleanly and intentionally to the template. If all you were doing was a one-off, then no need to go make it permanent. Not sure if the latest Fedora upgrade is going to break stuff you care about? Install and switch to it one appvm at a time. Something breaks, file a bug and switch that one back until its fixed.
I've had friends screwing around with AI agents get their systems really screwed up because running the agent in a VM was work and requires maintenance. .. in qubes its just the natural way to run it, a few clicks and you're good to go. And the maintenance overhead of running in a VM is mostly non-existent.
If you ever use VPNs for privacy or to access protected networks-- Qubes is a big upgrade: You can run multiple VPN network VMs and then pick on an AppQube by AppQube basis which network they use. Then you don't have to worry about malware from your reddit browsing VM (or your Erotic MLP fanfic) going out over your employer's network or your banking going out via some Norwegian anonmization proxy that might spy on your traffic or cause your bank to instantly block your account. You can accomplish this without qubes but in qubes its particularly easy (and easy to get right): Every VM that has network access has it provided by another VM. Configure the networking how you like in that service VM and then pick what uses it.
When I say 'developer' above I don't mean to suggest that Qubes is particularly hard to use-- as I know significantly less technical people who use it without issue. But its non-security/privacy advantages are most significant if you're doing experimentation with the computer's configuration.
However if you're doing stuff that is Video heavy-- particularly gaming, and to a lesser extent CAD, video editing, etc. Qubes really brutally hurts video performance. It can be somewhat offset by running on higher end hardware (and then getting performance of a few year older system). Even just watching youtube videos is obvious impacted.
Similarly, it dents battery life. This is addressable via additional batteries given that now laptops are usbc powered and 100wh external batteries are readily available. But this is something of a lifestyle question.
Even before the AI-apocalypse I considered qubes to be non-negotiable on laptops-- there are just far far far too many browser RCE vulnerabilities to consider anything less for any computer that isn't a total security write-off.
Previously if I followed a link to a sus site and had my browser crash (maybe even the day before a RCE-in-the-wild was announced). I'd have some rationally justified paranoia that my whole computer might be compromised. Now, I can close the app VM (or-- better-- toss the disposable, which I try to use for most browsing) and know that even if they exploited the browser they'd have to have a VM escape of some kind too to do me any lasting damage.
The highest security stuff still ought to be on isolated hardware, of course. But using a multipurpose computer without qubes is unsafe at any speed, worse than driving without a seatbelt.
How is remoting performance e.g. via VNC/RDP or particularly via Moonlight+Sunshine (intended for gaming and such)?
And how programmable is the configuration of Qubes? I like the idea of NixOS for example, but given how comparatively little activity there is in the actual nix rather than the packages, and across so few developers, I worry what would happen if someone got hit by a bus or something. But I still like programmatically configuring computers over manual monkey patches, because I have the memory of a gold fish. :p
I've used RDP w/ remmina and found the performance somewhat poor but usable-- I think it does too much video writes, so it's more like playing a video I expect Moonlight+Sunshine would be equal or worse. Xpra seems to work better than RDP for me. I didn't try to optimize the RDP since I tried xpra and it was better. (I use it to control remote GUI amateur radio software like WSJTX)
There are workarounds I didn't mention for video performance, e.g. handing direct hardware access to a GPU to a specific VM. But this obviously has security consequences and I don't have much experience with it.
Qubes itself is very thin. The most popular template vms (that you actually run apps in) are Fedora and Debian. The qubes system vms run on Fedora. So I think on the VM OSes themselves there is no maintenance concern-- so for example, you're not dependent on the qubes project for packaging software generally. (Though you do use qubes produced templates of the OS installs-- as they have some configuration to handle the overlay filesystems, clipboard, file transfer, networking, etc).
There is also work that people are doing to make NixOS a first class app vm image and even people working on being able to use it for dom0.
The qubes maintained stuff is dom0 and the glue that handles stuff like copying between VMs, wiring up networking to VMs, etc. Most of it is python. I've found relatively little need to mess with that stuff. Its configured via text files that are processed via (mostly) python scripts. Beyond the active developers there is a user community that has a lot of experience doing fancy stuff with the infrastructure, like adding support for ephemeral VMs that exist only in ram (for anti-forensics). I think that speaks positively to the maintainability of the system.
Ultimately because qubes is a system of VMs based on commodity OS migrating OUT shouldn't be fundamentally hard.
FWIW, I migrated in to qubes (from Fedora) by making an app VM for my existing laptop, copying the home into it. Then initially running everything in that one VM. It's not a good way to use Qubes, but it had me full on it in a couple hours with no loss of capability. From there it was easy to start moving things into other VMs until I no longer used the original.
Could you elaborate on the odds of death and permanent disability occurring through use of unsecured general purpose computers? Because if not using qubes has the same risk profile as not wearing seatbelts I might feel like taking some measures
The serious point in my quip is that I've been a driver for over 30 years and yet to have a seatbelt protect me. I've been hit with computer attacks that qubes has limited. Might be kinda tricky to kill me from compromising my computer, at least today. Who knows about the computer.
At this point I probably wouldn’t realize a legitimate Zoom meeting was legitimate.