this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2021
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Privacy
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The only problem with Qubes + Whonix combination is well it's not newbie friendly at all.
It shouldn't be, using Qubes+Whonix is for people who have the need for a super secure system, from starters you have a hardware barrier that would prevent a lot of people from using it. I mean, you can use it just because yes but I don't think there's much benefit.
Yeah it depends on your threat model but even if you have the right hardware, it would still be pretty hard if you are a newbie who say, has recently switched to Linux.
Furthermore, Linux knowledge will only help you to an extent with Qubes. You should ideally also be familiar with how Xen works and how it's configured.
What hardware barrier? I was under the assumption that you just need virtualization support in your CPU (which almost every consumer model also have nowadays), as well as simply more RAM for storing the parallel running operating systems.
You need a CRAZY amount of RAM, not just more RAM. At least having 128GB RAM as a bare minimum is not something I'd ever seen in my third world country, even for people with moderately good PCs. The price for that amount of RAM where I live is 972.96USD.
I'm assuming this is because Qubes OS allocates RAM independently for each VM, regardless of how much the VM is actually using? Does Xen not have the ability to use a pool of RAM and just overlap the empty space? I was under the assumption that enterprise level hypervisors could do that. Even if you have five VMs, if four of them are idle, in theory only a little more than one OS's worth of RAM should actually be filled with active data.
Qubes does not only use compartmentalization for stuff like browsing, if I remember correctly your /home folder is also a separate VM and I think there was something similar to this happening too, so I assume there's always at least like 3 or 4 VMs running. Either way AFAIK you still need that amount, regardless of if there's an alternative, which makes it non usable for poor people.
Fair enough. I said this in another comment already, but for this reason I really wish there was a viable desktop OS that uses a microkernel, since such an OS can be much more easily designed do secure compartmentalization without the need for VMs or duplicate parallel processes in general. A micorkernel OS still has more computational overhead than one monolithic kernel, but would be much more resource frugal than multiple VMs.