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Qubes OS is perfectly usable if you are a technical person and describes itself as "reasonably secure" https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ . Th

Qubes OS is perfectly usable if you are a technical person and describes itself as "reasonably secure" https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ . They take the security challenges of all the layers of the onion pretty seriously and have built a system that works well for many threat models. You do have to put up with some inconvenience (eg copying and pasting between vms etc) but you get a lot for that.

etiam 5y ago
Agreed. The main catch for most people who should be using it may be to first get hardware with full support to install it on. The range of machines with TPM and the appropriate virtualization and memory control capabilities is long enough, at least for laptops, but to additionally neuter Intel ME (AMD PSP still unsolvable for now?) and install open firmware and still have all of the functionality needed, is a pretty high bar. Then again, even without that last distance, at least it would improve the situation in many cases. I think Greggman is mostly wrong the software which people want to run is not available to run on Qubes, but one probably has to admit that stuff not available in the repositories of the Template systems could be a bit arduous to configure. Fancy Windows games demanding a powerful GPU seems a bit like asking for trouble that way. Probably both doable and acceptably practical with enough motivation though.
- seanhunter 5y ago
  Yeah. In my experience it has worked great on things like Lenovo Thinkpads and I also have it running on a Pureism Librem 15. It's sometimes a bit inconvenient but is totally usable as a daily main work OS (I used to use it as such).
beermonster 5y ago
This [1] is a good read. [1] https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/Software_compartmentalization_vs_physical_separation.pdf https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/Software_compa...
mikewarot 5y ago
Qubes looks great if you have a static separation of concerns you can plan for in advance. My instinct is that VMs in general are a improvised way to implement the principle of least privilege. I believe what we all want, but most of us don't realize yet, is the ability to generate a whitelist (capability) on the fly, and hand it off to an otherwise completely sandboxed application. This allows you to reason directly on what resources you're willing to trust to the process. By allowing a concrete manner of limiting side effects, you ensure that no matter how buggy, or even malicious, the process is, it can't modify anything else. This allows a level of security we haven't had since 2 floppy MS-DOS machines with write protect tabs that worked.

etiam 5y ago

Agreed. The main catch for most people who should be using it may be to first get hardware with full support to install it on. The range of machines with TPM and the appropriate virtualization and memory control capabilities is long enough, at least for laptops, but to additionally neuter Intel ME (AMD PSP still unsolvable for now?) and install open firmware and still have all of the functionality needed, is a pretty high bar. Then again, even without that last distance, at least it would improve the situation in many cases. I think Greggman is mostly wrong the software which people want to run is not available to run on Qubes, but one probably has to admit that stuff not available in the repositories of the Template systems could be a bit arduous to configure. Fancy Windows games demanding a powerful GPU seems a bit like asking for trouble that way. Probably both doable and acceptably practical with enough motivation though.

seanhunter 5y ago
Yeah. In my experience it has worked great on things like Lenovo Thinkpads and I also have it running on a Pureism Librem 15. It's sometimes a bit inconvenient but is totally usable as a daily main work OS (I used to use it as such).

beermonster 5y ago

This [1] is a good read. [1] https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/Software_compartmentalization_vs_physical_separation.pdf https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/Software_compa...

mikewarot 5y ago

Qubes looks great if you have a static separation of concerns you can plan for in advance. My instinct is that VMs in general are a improvised way to implement the principle of least privilege. I believe what we all want, but most of us don't realize yet, is the ability to generate a whitelist (capability) on the fly, and hand it off to an otherwise completely sandboxed application. This allows you to reason directly on what resources you're willing to trust to the process. By allowing a concrete manner of limiting side effects, you ensure that no matter how buggy, or even malicious, the process is, it can't modify anything else. This allows a level of security we haven't had since 2 floppy MS-DOS machines with write protect tabs that worked.