12 ms·

Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system

187 points by RafelMri 5y ago

xvilka 5y ago
Some time ago I suggested to integrate [1][2] ReactOS with QubesOS to run Windows programs in secure domains - it's problematic to do properly with the real Windows. [1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2809 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2809 [2] https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358 https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358
- fsflover 5y ago
  > [2] https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358 https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358 > Status:Resolved / Resolution: Won't Fix What? > it's problematic to do properly with the real Windows. Nevertheless you can run real Windows on Qubes: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/wip-windows-qwt-user-reports/9687 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/wip-windows-qwt-user-reports/96....
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Ah I see. It’s because they based their OS around windows 7 (up to) and so it is possible for newer programs to use newer apis and ReactOS wouldn’t be forward compatible. That sucks but given that information just installing Windows is the only proper solution.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  The FSB is probably working on it right now /s
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yewenjie 5y ago
I am looking forward to Spectrum which tries to make secure computing usable - https://spectrum-os.org/ https://spectrum-os.org/ .
- fsflover 5y ago
  Qubes is much more usable than people think. My daily driver for many years already. See also discussion of Spectrum OS on Qubes forum: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/spectrum-os-discussion/1531 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/spectrum-os-discussion/1531.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > My daily driver for many years already. Would you like to share more about your experience? How resource-intensive is it, what you do, what would a normal workflow look like with it compared to, say, a Fedora desktop?
    - fsflover 5y ago
      If your work requires GPU acceleration, then you're out of luck [0]. Normal apps like a browser, LibreOffice work fine. Hardware virtualization is extremely secure [1] and also fast. Everything which works on Linux should work on Qubes, including drivers (which are usually isolated in their own VMs). You can also run several different Linux flavors simultaneously [2] and Windows [3], too. The downside is that you really need a lot of RAM for that (unless you try to minimize your VMs [4], which is an advanced feature). I have 32 GB, and I never run out of RAM. I love that you can explicitly compartmentalize your digital live into independent VMs with a great unified interface. I have "work" VM which contains all work stuff and "personal" VM for personal things. More thoughts from me: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15. [0] https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#can-i-run-applications-like-games-which-require-hardware-acceleration https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#can-i-run-applications-like-ga... [1] https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/ https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/ [2] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/#official https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/#official [3] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/windows/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/windows/ [4] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/
      - pabs3 5y ago
kkfx 5y ago
Honestly It's not a "reasonably secure OS" but an "absurd OS", absurd because for safety we have since few decades a very lightweight and very effective solutions: Plan 9 namespaces. Actual older than Plan 9 but still alive OSes have done limited and limiting choices but many have something "somewhat equivalent", for instance GNU/Linux cgroups (see FireJail, BubbleWrap etc) or FreeBSD Capsicum. Choosing anything heavyweight is a nonsense.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Plan 9 was so far ahead of its time we still haven't caught up.
  - gnufx 5y ago
    If you're talking about security, and regarding namespaces as a coarse-grained capability system, it was late to the game.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I think they mean the networking (everything is a file on the network.) This wasn’t adopted but Fuse etc have brought that functionality to Linux. If you really want to model plan9 on Linux there’s an app for that that runs atop Linux.
      - gnufx 5y ago
        Heaven knows what someone conflating cgroups and namespaces means in connexion with Qubes. Anyway, if you want to know what I mean, read the paper "Security in Plan 9". "Linux" is irrelevant, and the various Plan 9 stuff-on-Unix efforts surely aren't going to improve the security of the OS.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        You are the one who mentioned security, not the other user. My point was I don’t think they were referring to security as Plan9s most famous features very much have made their way into every major OS out there.
Nextgrid 5y ago
I’m using this as a daily driver. It’s usable and the security benefits are definitely important when working with multiple security domains (separate clients each with their own confidential data and third-party dependencies, where you don’t want one client’s malicious NPM dependency affecting the other). However, there are cons. It’s only really usable in a stationary environment; it completely kills battery life and even basic tasks such as (non-HD) video display maxes out a single CPU core so it’s just not worth trying on a laptop. Hibernation doesn’t seem to be supported by default which becomes risky when combined with the extreme power usage.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Indeed the battery life is shorter than with normal Linux, but it's fine with me. Concerning the hibernation, see this: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2414 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2414.
- orblivion 5y ago
  I use it on my Librem-15 v3. I can confirm that it's a PITA as far as performance. One "nice" thing is that if a process makes your VM unresponsive, it's just about always contained to that VM. You can kill it and restart it and not interrupt anything else. The other problem is memory. I have to decide to between Signal Desktop and development sometimes. But it's my main machine for what I care. I love the peace of mind running random things if the need comes up. For more intensive stuff, media games etc, I have a previous machine running Ubuntu.
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
    > if a process makes your VM unresponsive, it's just about always contained to that VM. I still wonder why kernels can't just handle this properly. I've seen it in both Windows and Linux systems, something takes all the CPU or I/O or RAM, and the UI is so starved that you can't kill it. Shouldn't that already be handled by things like virtual memory, and the kernel scheduler? Why do modern OSes, that have to protect against such complicated attacks like Spectre, struggle to do what the very first multi-tasking kernels promised before I was born?
mtreis86 5y ago
I've been using Qubes for over five years now as my work/coding machine. A couple notes if anyone is curious. As for performance it is pretty good for what it is. My laptop is too old to do much of anything serious anyways, 2011 x220, but with 16gb RAM I don't really have issues with day-to-day use. I can't play full screen youtube which in other Linux OSes will work so there is something about that pipeline that isn't as performant. My usual use is running emacs and SBCL, no issues there. I give my work VM around 8gb of RAM and that is more than enough. One nice thing I have done repeatedly, I have written up a server in my work vm, then cloned the vm with all my code in /home, then reduced the ram on the clone to just enough to run some code as a server, and tested it. Once the code is nice and I would then spin up a fresh VM from the same template but without any of the /home files to run it from, copy the right folder over, and run it for a while in long term sort of testing. As someone who runs VMs randomly for various reasons it is nice to have them integrated into the machine. Before this I was using a Linux box with KVMs and working from within a VM anyways. Having all the VMs update with only a couple clicks is very convinient, as is making backups of them. Having them all display windows within one desktop enviornment is fantastic for such a small screen. Only annoyance is having a couple extra clicks to pull the clipboard from one VM to another but I got used to it and it doesn't bother me anymore.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > I can't play full screen youtube which in other Linux OSes will work so there is something about that pipeline that isn't as performant. Works fine for me. Did you try alt+F11 and giving enough RAM and CPUs?
  - pph 5y ago
    The issue is likely that in Qubes OS you don't have hardware acceleration. The bottleneck might very well be single thread performance, though your tips are worth a try. For me it depends on the specifics of the video, usually ~10 Mbit/s 1080p x264 and YouTube at 1080p is mostly ok, but I don't even need to try 2160p content. (i5-9500T)
- isodude 5y ago
pabs3 5y ago
Anyone know why this uses Xen instead of KVM for virtualisation?
- detaro 5y ago
  Estimation that it has the smaller attack surface (from https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/ https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/)
- jaas 5y ago
  From the FAQ: In short: we believe the Xen architecture allows for the creation of more secure systems (i.e. with a much smaller TCB, which translates to a smaller attack surface). We discuss this in much greater depth in our Architecture Specification document: https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/doc/arch-spec-0.3.pdf https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/doc/arch-spec-0.3.pdf
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051
cf141q5325 5y ago
Happily using it for a few years now, though on a beefy desktop machine. Stability issues are limited to a firefox issue on the fedora Domains and some hickups with dual monitors on startup.
samuell 5y ago
I tried using Qubes as a daily driver for a couple of weeks, and wrote up my experiences: https://rillabs.org/posts/installing-qubes-os https://rillabs.org/posts/installing-qubes-os Overall an impressive and surprisingly well functioning software, given what it does. Unfortunately - which I didn't write in the post yet, should do - is that I felt I had to switch back to a normal distro again because of a combination of a couple of annoyances: - The need to manually redirect the USB-keyboard to each qube - The fact that I couldn't get Debian-based Qubes to respect the font size settings - The overall relative slowness of the system, causing some already slow software to be even slower - The last straw: Inability to run Virtualbox VMs in Qubes (which I use to create some course content etc).
- dmm 5y ago
  > The need to manually redirect the USB-keyboard to each qube Why did you have to do this? In order to type in a qube? My usb keyboard just stays connected to the usb qube(sys-usb) and everything seems to work. I have never changed the qube my usb keyboard is connected to.
  - orblivion 5y ago
    If the signals are going into sys-usb you must be piping them somewhere. For me and probably the GP, there's a "systray" (do they still call it that?) menu for connecting devices to things, and I have to direct my keyboard to a chosen VM that way (I have the added annoyance of having to re-set Dvorak each time; there's a bug somewhere). Maybe for you it's piping straight to dom0? I recall at the beginning there was some security question you're asked related to this. Maybe you answered differently than us.
    - samuell 5y ago
      Exactly, the "systray" thing that is needed to switch the keyboard betweeen qubes. Dom0 would not even be accessible from USB-keyboards, for USB-related security reasons.
      - 5y ago
gnufx 5y ago
Can anyone compare Qubes and Genode from a security or usability point of view? Genode now advertises hardware acceleration (on Intel and Vivante GPUs only) in contrast to Qubes, per discussion here.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I have encountered people who use Qubes as a daily-driver while the same is not true of Genode. That might say more about my circle of friends or the popularity than usability, bit I suspect it's indicative...
ffeiek 5y ago
I hope it uses btrfs as a storage driver by default. It runs smoothly on many SSDs and doesn't take long time to shutdown the qube.
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/is-it-a-good-idea-to-use-btrfs/3977 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/is-it-a-good-idea-to-use-btrfs/... https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/btrfs-and-qubes-os/6967 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/btrfs-and-qubes-os/6967
floatinglotus 5y ago
Reasonably is a meaningless word in IT.
- jFriedensreich 5y ago
  That is on purpose: The mission statement is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek as a nod to the complexity and difficult tradeoffs in anything security related.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  So is "powerful" "high performance" "scalable" "fast" and the #1 weasel word of IT is: "lightweight".
latenightcoding 5y ago
ctrl+f "daily driver" in this thread
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I had no idea so many people tried it. It felt so niche (like more niche than nixos)..
apienx 5y ago
I once had a bunch of reasons to believe that my main linux machine had been compromised by a (totalitarian) state actor for months. As soon as I googled "qubes", all input devices froze. I went and bought a new machine. Dissent is costly. :-) P.S. Saw that same "frozen" behavior a few years earlier when trying to wipe drives from a live OS.
walrus01 5y ago
One of the major issues that I ran into is that the proprietary nvidia driver for desktop graphics cards and a xen dom0 hypervisor do NOT coexist well on the same machine. Not really qubes specific, you can see the same if you take an ordinary debian-stable desktop linux system with nvidia graphics card and install the xen packages, then attempt to boot into a xen enabled kernel.

187 points by RafelMri 5y ago

Some time ago I suggested to integrate [1][2] ReactOS with QubesOS to run Windows programs in secure domains - it's problematic to do properly with the real Windows. [1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2809 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2809 [2] https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358 https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358

fsflover 5y ago
> [2] https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358 https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13358 > Status:Resolved / Resolution: Won't Fix What? > it's problematic to do properly with the real Windows. Nevertheless you can run real Windows on Qubes: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/wip-windows-qwt-user-reports/9687 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/wip-windows-qwt-user-reports/96....
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Ah I see. It’s because they based their OS around windows 7 (up to) and so it is possible for newer programs to use newer apis and ReactOS wouldn’t be forward compatible. That sucks but given that information just installing Windows is the only proper solution.
nivenkos 5y ago
The FSB is probably working on it right now /s

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yewenjie 5y ago

I am looking forward to Spectrum which tries to make secure computing usable - https://spectrum-os.org/ https://spectrum-os.org/ .

fsflover 5y ago
Qubes is much more usable than people think. My daily driver for many years already. See also discussion of Spectrum OS on Qubes forum: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/spectrum-os-discussion/1531 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/spectrum-os-discussion/1531.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > My daily driver for many years already. Would you like to share more about your experience? How resource-intensive is it, what you do, what would a normal workflow look like with it compared to, say, a Fedora desktop?
  - fsflover 5y ago
    If your work requires GPU acceleration, then you're out of luck [0]. Normal apps like a browser, LibreOffice work fine. Hardware virtualization is extremely secure [1] and also fast. Everything which works on Linux should work on Qubes, including drivers (which are usually isolated in their own VMs). You can also run several different Linux flavors simultaneously [2] and Windows [3], too. The downside is that you really need a lot of RAM for that (unless you try to minimize your VMs [4], which is an advanced feature). I have 32 GB, and I never run out of RAM. I love that you can explicitly compartmentalize your digital live into independent VMs with a great unified interface. I have "work" VM which contains all work stuff and "personal" VM for personal things. More thoughts from me: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15. [0] https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#can-i-run-applications-like-games-which-require-hardware-acceleration https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#can-i-run-applications-like-ga... [1] https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/ https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/ [2] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/#official https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/#official [3] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/windows/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/windows/ [4] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/
    - pabs3 5y ago

kkfx 5y ago

Honestly It's not a "reasonably secure OS" but an "absurd OS", absurd because for safety we have since few decades a very lightweight and very effective solutions: Plan 9 namespaces. Actual older than Plan 9 but still alive OSes have done limited and limiting choices but many have something "somewhat equivalent", for instance GNU/Linux cgroups (see FireJail, BubbleWrap etc) or FreeBSD Capsicum. Choosing anything heavyweight is a nonsense.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Plan 9 was so far ahead of its time we still haven't caught up.
- gnufx 5y ago
  If you're talking about security, and regarding namespaces as a coarse-grained capability system, it was late to the game.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I think they mean the networking (everything is a file on the network.) This wasn’t adopted but Fuse etc have brought that functionality to Linux. If you really want to model plan9 on Linux there’s an app for that that runs atop Linux.
    - gnufx 5y ago
      Heaven knows what someone conflating cgroups and namespaces means in connexion with Qubes. Anyway, if you want to know what I mean, read the paper "Security in Plan 9". "Linux" is irrelevant, and the various Plan 9 stuff-on-Unix efforts surely aren't going to improve the security of the OS.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        You are the one who mentioned security, not the other user. My point was I don’t think they were referring to security as Plan9s most famous features very much have made their way into every major OS out there.

Nextgrid 5y ago

I’m using this as a daily driver. It’s usable and the security benefits are definitely important when working with multiple security domains (separate clients each with their own confidential data and third-party dependencies, where you don’t want one client’s malicious NPM dependency affecting the other). However, there are cons. It’s only really usable in a stationary environment; it completely kills battery life and even basic tasks such as (non-HD) video display maxes out a single CPU core so it’s just not worth trying on a laptop. Hibernation doesn’t seem to be supported by default which becomes risky when combined with the extreme power usage.

fsflover 5y ago
Indeed the battery life is shorter than with normal Linux, but it's fine with me. Concerning the hibernation, see this: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2414 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2414.
orblivion 5y ago
I use it on my Librem-15 v3. I can confirm that it's a PITA as far as performance. One "nice" thing is that if a process makes your VM unresponsive, it's just about always contained to that VM. You can kill it and restart it and not interrupt anything else. The other problem is memory. I have to decide to between Signal Desktop and development sometimes. But it's my main machine for what I care. I love the peace of mind running random things if the need comes up. For more intensive stuff, media games etc, I have a previous machine running Ubuntu.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  > if a process makes your VM unresponsive, it's just about always contained to that VM. I still wonder why kernels can't just handle this properly. I've seen it in both Windows and Linux systems, something takes all the CPU or I/O or RAM, and the UI is so starved that you can't kill it. Shouldn't that already be handled by things like virtual memory, and the kernel scheduler? Why do modern OSes, that have to protect against such complicated attacks like Spectre, struggle to do what the very first multi-tasking kernels promised before I was born?

mtreis86 5y ago

I've been using Qubes for over five years now as my work/coding machine. A couple notes if anyone is curious. As for performance it is pretty good for what it is. My laptop is too old to do much of anything serious anyways, 2011 x220, but with 16gb RAM I don't really have issues with day-to-day use. I can't play full screen youtube which in other Linux OSes will work so there is something about that pipeline that isn't as performant. My usual use is running emacs and SBCL, no issues there. I give my work VM around 8gb of RAM and that is more than enough. One nice thing I have done repeatedly, I have written up a server in my work vm, then cloned the vm with all my code in /home, then reduced the ram on the clone to just enough to run some code as a server, and tested it. Once the code is nice and I would then spin up a fresh VM from the same template but without any of the /home files to run it from, copy the right folder over, and run it for a while in long term sort of testing. As someone who runs VMs randomly for various reasons it is nice to have them integrated into the machine. Before this I was using a Linux box with KVMs and working from within a VM anyways. Having all the VMs update with only a couple clicks is very convinient, as is making backups of them. Having them all display windows within one desktop enviornment is fantastic for such a small screen. Only annoyance is having a couple extra clicks to pull the clipboard from one VM to another but I got used to it and it doesn't bother me anymore.

fsflover 5y ago
> I can't play full screen youtube which in other Linux OSes will work so there is something about that pipeline that isn't as performant. Works fine for me. Did you try alt+F11 and giving enough RAM and CPUs?
- pph 5y ago
  The issue is likely that in Qubes OS you don't have hardware acceleration. The bottleneck might very well be single thread performance, though your tips are worth a try. For me it depends on the specifics of the video, usually ~10 Mbit/s 1080p x264 and YouTube at 1080p is mostly ok, but I don't even need to try 2160p content. (i5-9500T)
isodude 5y ago

pabs3 5y ago

Anyone know why this uses Xen instead of KVM for virtualisation?

detaro 5y ago
Estimation that it has the smaller attack surface (from https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/ https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/)
jaas 5y ago
From the FAQ: In short: we believe the Xen architecture allows for the creation of more secure systems (i.e. with a much smaller TCB, which translates to a smaller attack surface). We discuss this in much greater depth in our Architecture Specification document: https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/doc/arch-spec-0.3.pdf https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/doc/arch-spec-0.3.pdf
fsflover 5y ago
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051

cf141q5325 5y ago

Happily using it for a few years now, though on a beefy desktop machine. Stability issues are limited to a firefox issue on the fedora Domains and some hickups with dual monitors on startup.

samuell 5y ago

I tried using Qubes as a daily driver for a couple of weeks, and wrote up my experiences: https://rillabs.org/posts/installing-qubes-os https://rillabs.org/posts/installing-qubes-os Overall an impressive and surprisingly well functioning software, given what it does. Unfortunately - which I didn't write in the post yet, should do - is that I felt I had to switch back to a normal distro again because of a combination of a couple of annoyances: - The need to manually redirect the USB-keyboard to each qube - The fact that I couldn't get Debian-based Qubes to respect the font size settings - The overall relative slowness of the system, causing some already slow software to be even slower - The last straw: Inability to run Virtualbox VMs in Qubes (which I use to create some course content etc).

dmm 5y ago
> The need to manually redirect the USB-keyboard to each qube Why did you have to do this? In order to type in a qube? My usb keyboard just stays connected to the usb qube(sys-usb) and everything seems to work. I have never changed the qube my usb keyboard is connected to.
- orblivion 5y ago
  If the signals are going into sys-usb you must be piping them somewhere. For me and probably the GP, there's a "systray" (do they still call it that?) menu for connecting devices to things, and I have to direct my keyboard to a chosen VM that way (I have the added annoyance of having to re-set Dvorak each time; there's a bug somewhere). Maybe for you it's piping straight to dom0? I recall at the beginning there was some security question you're asked related to this. Maybe you answered differently than us.
  - samuell 5y ago
    Exactly, the "systray" thing that is needed to switch the keyboard betweeen qubes. Dom0 would not even be accessible from USB-keyboards, for USB-related security reasons.
    - 5y ago

gnufx 5y ago

Can anyone compare Qubes and Genode from a security or usability point of view? Genode now advertises hardware acceleration (on Intel and Vivante GPUs only) in contrast to Qubes, per discussion here.

aidenn0 5y ago
I have encountered people who use Qubes as a daily-driver while the same is not true of Genode. That might say more about my circle of friends or the popularity than usability, bit I suspect it's indicative...

ffeiek 5y ago

I hope it uses btrfs as a storage driver by default. It runs smoothly on many SSDs and doesn't take long time to shutdown the qube.

fsflover 5y ago
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/is-it-a-good-idea-to-use-btrfs/3977 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/is-it-a-good-idea-to-use-btrfs/... https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/btrfs-and-qubes-os/6967 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/btrfs-and-qubes-os/6967

floatinglotus 5y ago

Reasonably is a meaningless word in IT.

jFriedensreich 5y ago
That is on purpose: The mission statement is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek as a nod to the complexity and difficult tradeoffs in anything security related.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
So is "powerful" "high performance" "scalable" "fast" and the #1 weasel word of IT is: "lightweight".

latenightcoding 5y ago

ctrl+f "daily driver" in this thread

agumonkey 5y ago
I had no idea so many people tried it. It felt so niche (like more niche than nixos)..

apienx 5y ago

I once had a bunch of reasons to believe that my main linux machine had been compromised by a (totalitarian) state actor for months. As soon as I googled "qubes", all input devices froze. I went and bought a new machine. Dissent is costly. :-) P.S. Saw that same "frozen" behavior a few years earlier when trying to wipe drives from a live OS.

walrus01 5y ago

One of the major issues that I ran into is that the proprietary nvidia driver for desktop graphics cards and a xen dom0 hypervisor do NOT coexist well on the same machine. Not really qubes specific, you can see the same if you take an ordinary debian-stable desktop linux system with nvidia graphics card and install the xen packages, then attempt to boot into a xen enabled kernel.