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

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.