4 ms·

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. Equal

by aborsy 3y ago

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.

crtasm 3y ago
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.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  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.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    I can see that reasoning but also have no idea how much testing/fuzzing/etc. i3 gets compared to Xfce?
BodyCulture 3y ago
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.
- adultSwim 3y ago
  > 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.
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    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.
    - crtasm 3y ago
      Perhaps try KDE? https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/kde/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/kde/
  - fsflover 3y ago
    > 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/21906 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improving-video-playback-speed/... https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hd-video-playback-on-qubes-os-older-computers/17849 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hd-video-playback-on-qubes-os-o... https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improve-video-playback-performance-including-youtube-ytfzf/21946 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improve-video-playback-performa... and https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8962 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8962
    - adultSwim 3y ago
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  personally I'm obsessed with the Chicago95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
circusfly 3y ago
Gnome is terrible. I will choose either KDE or XFCE any day.
chaxor 3y ago
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.
- kop316 3y ago
  Not yet, but they are working on switching over.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  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/ https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/ and scroll down to "How does Qubes OS provide security?" to understand better.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    However switching to Wayland will improve performance: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3366 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3366
    - seanhunter 3y ago
      For sure. I would really like them to do it.
fsflover 3y ago
> 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#issuecomment-1768557436 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1806#issuecom... However you can easily install KDE.
pjmlp 3y ago
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.

by aborsy 3y ago

crtasm 3y ago

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.

seanhunter 3y ago
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.
- crtasm 3y ago
  I can see that reasoning but also have no idea how much testing/fuzzing/etc. i3 gets compared to Xfce?

BodyCulture 3y ago

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.

adultSwim 3y ago
> 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.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  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.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    Perhaps try KDE? https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/kde/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/kde/
- fsflover 3y ago
  > 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/21906 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improving-video-playback-speed/... https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hd-video-playback-on-qubes-os-older-computers/17849 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hd-video-playback-on-qubes-os-o... https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improve-video-playback-performance-including-youtube-ytfzf/21946 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improve-video-playback-performa... and https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8962 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8962
  - adultSwim 3y ago
jazzyjackson 3y ago
personally I'm obsessed with the Chicago95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

circusfly 3y ago

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

chaxor 3y ago

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.

kop316 3y ago
Not yet, but they are working on switching over.
seanhunter 3y ago
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/ https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/ and scroll down to "How does Qubes OS provide security?" to understand better.
- fsflover 3y ago
  However switching to Wayland will improve performance: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3366 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3366
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    For sure. I would really like them to do it.

fsflover 3y ago

> 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#issuecomment-1768557436 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1806#issuecom... However you can easily install KDE.

pjmlp 3y ago

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.