I am a Qubes user for a couple years now, and I wish I'd switched to it years earlier. Basically every criticism you hear is about correct-- principally worse

I am a Qubes user for a couple years now, and I wish I'd switched to it years earlier. Basically every criticism you hear is about correct-- principally worse graphics performance and battery life. But the performance issues for me were less bad than I expected, and the seamlessness of its usability was much much higher than I expected. Like copy and paste, moving files between VMs, plugging usb devices into VMs, networking, etc. all pretty much just work. It's pretty impressive if you have any idea of the machinery under the hood needed to make that work. And now I don't feel anywhere near as nervous that whatever vendor program I need to use to configure a device or browser zero day is going to compromise my system. I can read documents from adverse threat actor sources in a netless VM and feel reasonably confident that it can't phone home or steal my data, etc. Obviously it doesn't replace real air gap security, but it's the closest thing you can get to a network of airgapped or firewalled per-application computers which you can fit into a laptop bag. I also like that I can use software that really only works right on fedora/redhat along side software that really only works right on debian. (Or windows, for that matter, but it's not as seamless). I like that I can substantially upgrade my operating system while running--- like I went from fedora40 to 41 just by installing the template, and switching over appvms one at a time. If anything goes wrong it's trivial to roll back, and I can have some app vms that work fine on the new stuff while others are held back if there is a compatibility issue. I like that applications that go nuts and try to use all my memory only screw up the VM that they're in instead of my whole system. It's so nice that when I want to get something working I can spin up a vm and scribble all over it until I get it working. Binary patch my libc, whatever. Then once I've solved it, I can apply the final clean solution to a persistent template. Any random experimentation just goes away when I close the appvm. Need some program just for a single thing? install it in the appvm rather than the template and it naturally is gone later. I can be intentional about changes being either ephemeral or persistent, and never have to worry that the removal of something temporary was incomplete. Of course YMMV, -- if you're someone who is mostly doing text and low performance graphics and can run it on a fast computer then its costs will be small. If you'd find a ten year old computer perfectly usable chances are that qubes on a modern computer won't seem slow or poor battery lifed to you. Particularly if you have other computers for games, 3d gfx, full screen video, etc. If you are someone who has been subjected to targeted hacking attempts the increased peace of mind will be substantial.