I am still impressed by QubesOS track and I use it for my dedicated 'financials' laptop.
IMHO the thing that is holding back QubesOS is the lack of hardware acceleration for graphics - maybe now when dual monitor setups are getting popular this could be a workaround for the security considerations?
I dropped QubesOS once exactly for that reason in the past but now I’m running it again on a separate computer.
Even with all its drawbacks, there is something really nice about being able to run different applications over Tor, VPN or plain internet simultaneously, the ability to isolate non-safe binaries and being able to backup your VMs easily.
I wish a similar distro would be made based on KVM so that the standard kernel could be used. It would be great for compatibility.
[−]tom_alexander · 2026-08-30 Sun 13:42 UTC ·
link
> being able to run different applications over Tor, VPN or plain internet simultaneously, the ability to isolate non-safe binaries and being able to backup your VMs easily.
These are all possible using light containers. For example, on FreeBSD I will spin up a jail which runs wireguard, and then I'll bridge that to another a jail. That 2nd jail is running entirely off wireguard without any other way to access the network. Since it is a jail, it is isolated. And backing up is as simple as a zfs snapshot and zfs send. I assume the same is possible on Linux.
Problem is not that nobody wants to do it, it is that GPU stack is exactly the kind of enormous driver surface Qubes exists to keep away from dom0. Second monitor does not really change that, somebody still has to trust the driver.
IMHO the thing that is holding back QubesOS is the lack of hardware acceleration for graphics - maybe now when dual monitor setups are getting popular this could be a workaround for the security considerations?
Even with all its drawbacks, there is something really nice about being able to run different applications over Tor, VPN or plain internet simultaneously, the ability to isolate non-safe binaries and being able to backup your VMs easily.
I wish a similar distro would be made based on KVM so that the standard kernel could be used. It would be great for compatibility.
There is an Issue for that: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051
These are all possible using light containers. For example, on FreeBSD I will spin up a jail which runs wireguard, and then I'll bridge that to another a jail. That 2nd jail is running entirely off wireguard without any other way to access the network. Since it is a jail, it is isolated. And backing up is as simple as a zfs snapshot and zfs send. I assume the same is possible on Linux.