Why one would use Qubes OS? (2023)

(dataswamp.org)

29 points | by lemper 9 hours ago ago

13 comments

  • atmanactive an hour ago

    I hope Qubes OS developed a solution for GPU passthrough by now, as, reading the article, that's the only thing that's missing, back in 2023. Similar to how sys-net and sys-usb work, we need sys-pci and ... done.

  • freeqaz 7 hours ago

    One of the killer features of Qubes when I used it was the ability to "pause" a VM and all of the apps running in it. That's something I've tried to replicate with tools like tmuxp but I've never found an abstraction as clean as "serialize the whole process tree to disk" like Qubes has.

    I gave up on it for usability reasons, but that feature is killer. Anybody else aware of anything similar?

    • bjoli 23 minutes ago

      I have used VMs to configure gaming keyboards. Razer's huntsman v2 red silent is an amazing office keyboard, but you need the brain vomit "Synapse" to configure it. I just start a VM, install Synapse and go to town instead, leaving my regular system pristine.

    • orbital-decay 5 hours ago

      The amount of hidden state modern hardware uses is humongous, it's infeasible without abstracting it in a VM. I remember some Win9x software that would let you save the process state to disk and restore it later, but even in that much more primitive era it was hit and miss.

      • brubois an hour ago

        and yet, Microsoft do it on their consoles with the "quick resume" feature.

        • rbanffy an hour ago

          It helps to have full control over software and hardware.

        • 0points an hour ago

          > Win9x

    • atmanactive an hour ago

      > I gave up on it for usability reasons

      Pray tell what were those reasons?

    • harry8 4 hours ago

      There used to be cryopid in the days of 32 bit x86 and it was great and Bernard is cool.

      https://github.com/maaziz/cryopid

      Somehow I doubt it's still a thing but haven't had a reason to check.

    • yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours ago

      Look at https://criu.org/Main_Page - it's meant for exactly that, though the problem space is genuinely hard.

    • vaylian 6 hours ago

      What is your use-case for it? Hibernation?

  • fsflover an hour ago
  • 17 minutes ago
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