What is your desktop OS?

brev

VeryRob Plug your phone into a Thunderbolt dock and have fun

ClickClickDrone

brev
Just a note, but doing that requires a Pixel 8 or above.

aurocha

It varies between Fedora, Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed. I'm currently running the latter and not in the mood to change anytime soon. Separate encrypted /home directory, encrypted root w/ btrfs snapshots? openSUSE is very underrrated and it shouldn't.

Cheers,

WAU3604

Johnnyloans

You remind me of my current laptop. I got it about half a year ago as it seemed good with a Ryzen 7 7730U(more powerful than anything I currently have) and 40GB of Ram all for ~$600. After having it for months I found that they just really did me dirty. 8GB is soldered and 32GB are socketted in, so they are mismatched. And I have had consistent black screen crashes on both Windows and Linux if I go above 8GB, where the system gradually becomes unstable until complete crash/hardware reset(sometimes it would still be "stable" and just lock out any keyboard or mouse inputs so the hardware reset would be manual). These were pretty frequent, the worst I had was it crashing multiple times(like 6 or more) in one day. So I have to be very careful with what I am doing, and this really frustrates me as it messes with my workflow when it happens.

shapirus

WAU3604 8GB is soldered and 32GB are socketted in, so they are mismatched. And I have had consistent black screen crashes on both Windows and Linux if I go above 8GB

Memory mismatching shouldn't be a problem per se. Just today I installed an expansion 32 GB DIMM module into my Thinkpad T14 with a Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U which originally had a soldered-in 16 GB memory chip(s).

No problems whatsoever so far. Maybe it won't reach the top possible speed because of the single/dual channel matching stuff, but I don't care. I need to volume to avoid even thinking about needing to enable any swap.

You may want to run memtest86+ to see if your expansion DIMM module is all right.

wuseman

brev
Any recommendations for a cheap dock that works for this?

Byku

I tried daily driving QubesOS for about a year and boy, people who complain about GrapheneOS not being user friendly don't have a clue. Qubes has a great concept - security by virtualization while still giving you full root control over your OS, best of both worlds right? Only problem is that I could use the reverse of the slogan "it just works" to describe this OS. Nothing works as it should. Let's start from updates, the basic framework of any OS. You should be able to get at least that much working smoothly, right? Well, no. Any major update of Qubes expects you to reinstall it, deal with backups, updating your now outdated VMs and a plethora of BS. In place update is very poorly supported and get ready to dive into the forum to troubleshoot, which is like 90% of how you spend your time while using Qubes. Ditto for updating it's templates to their higher versions. It gets worse. For an OS concentrating on virualization it does a worse job than any other VM system out there. It uses some patched together hybrid of XEN/libvirt/QEmu with most of their options either unavailable or hidden by default. No GPU support for VMs. Poor Windows support. You are left with a full capacity of late 80s/early 90s PC. Or are you? Tried using it like a boring office machine and turns out it's not even capable of that since the printer just won't work even after following all the tutorials and getting it recognized and theoretically running without errors. Same for GPU passthrough. Same for basically everything. Maybe I can at least listen music on it? Not really. It supports 48kHz max so again if you have some good hardware connected it goes to waste. Well okay, but it will play right? The OS almost died when trying to play my playlist from a fedora VM, froze to death practically. Wow, it can't do a feat an old 32-bit Winamp can do with 0 problems. So what can you do with it? Just browse internet? Technically yes, but forget about watching anything on YouTube ect. - remember, no GPU. This is a the most genuine "it just doesn't work" experience I've had. And I did left out a lot in this text. I can think of no use case for QubesOS at all.

Johnnyloans

Byku The OS almost died when trying to play my playlist from a fedora VM, froze to death practically.

Hahaha.
Thanks for the write up

void0

Byku

When the question "What is the most secure desktop os for a newbie" is posed I always see guys coming out of the woodwork recommending qubes or tails with a persistent drive ignoring the most important part of the question lol.

I am going to make a PSA here:
Flatpaks are good enough for the vast majority followed by firejail.

you don't know anything about computing

I daily an extremely hardened gentoo box which (small flex) wasn't affected by dirtyfrag or the xz scandal. I have also written selinux policies for browsers but I would never recommend something like my setup to a nontechnical user. I get some privacy maxi's have their heart in the right place, and that qubes does have a spot in the security world, but it is not a good recommendation to the vast majority of users.

Point I am trying to get across is that fedora silverblue with a restrictive flatpak setup is generally good enough, if you are concerned by state level adversaries running browser based zero days bundled with a sandbox escape and priv escalation, my recommendation is to not use a computer.

pixelfairy

Byku What hardware do you run it on? One of the biggest hassles about qubes is how picky it is about hardware. But its been my daily for years now. Some of what you say is true. If your not a command line junkie, qubes is not ready for you. When ever something goes wrong, thats how you fix it. The lack of 3d acceleration and nested virtualizaion are design decisions, and another reason qubes isn't for many use cases. Haven't run windows in qubes for years, but judging from their forum, its not fully there yet. I do run remote windows desktops without issue. The built in backup system takes up a lot of space.

Can't remember trouble getting printing to work, but that could be just luck. Can't remember the last time I had printer trouble in macos or linux either.

For most qubes users I know, updating templates and rebooting appvms is the biggest hassle, but not much of one. You can reduce the frequency by keeping your templates lean and making more for specialized cases. Havent had update issues since its current release, 4.3. I watch full screen video, even youtube and twitch, at 1080p and listen to music all the time. Sometimes streamed from twitch or kick. Office apps work fine, though I've seen some comments about performance issues in libreoffice. It could be specific uses because its been fine for me.

On the plus side, split gpg and ssh are great. Having a separate vault vm for keepass makes so much more sense than running it in a monolithic desktop. Its vm based compartmentalization is something you get used to.

Graphene on desktop is the only OS I can think of that competes with qubes, though I think mobile oses have at least as good potential here. Esp Graphenes future plans, https://grapheneos.org/faq#roadmap if it can match qubes level of compartmentalization.

Youri

overpass Arch, the good thing is that you choose like 90% of what you have on it, a 'GOS like distro' would be Qubeos, and it is even more secure if you ise it well. But honestly if you care about your opsec you should just reinstall your distro each month.

brev

wuseman I have a Lenovo Thunderbolt 40B0 dock that I picked up off ebay. Works, but desktop mode is pretty janky on my 34" monitor

ryrona

pixelfairy I watch full screen video, even youtube and twitch, at 1080p and listen to music all the time.

Yeah, I also watch 1080p video in QubesOS just fine, including in the web browser. But it took a laptop with a 12-core CPU and 32 GB RAM to be able to do that (:

QubesOS is notoriously resource hungry, which of course is expected when one run 5-10 virtual computers in one real, and everything is software rendered. But with the right hardware, QubesOS works fine for everyday usage when threat model calls for strong isolation between security domains. QubesOS has been my daily driver for years too.

aj53108

Fedora for me

pixelfairy

ryrona Until last year, did it on a laptop with 4 cores and felt like 32gigs was a nice overkill. Until a few years ago, 16 gigs seems to be the sweet spot. Early on, my qubes laptop had 8 gigs of ram, but that took some mangement. Dont remember any problem with full screen video as long only a few vms were running and none were too busy. That old one was a thinkpad. The one with 4 cores was system76, so generic hardware. Anything higher than 1080p was always a problem.

gosuser2

Fedora

take KDE if you are windows user
take GNOME if you are mac user

whoisdanny

Is here an orchestrated campaign going on against Qubes OS? Im joking of course, mostly...
I mean have you all read the documentation of Qubes? Most things are explained there, maybe not in the easiest way, but they are explained there.
The only 3 big differences compared to other OS's are, that

For Qubes OS you have to read the documentation, at least the basics, not completely + the documentation for Qubes-Whonix, which is not on the QubesOS website, but at the Wonix website.
Because it's a different OS, like with all OS's it will be different than your previous OS....nothing really too special about this point
It is more resource hungry, but that mostly refers to the CPU. But you don't need a powerful CPU. If you have a weak CPU, you just need to know, that the standard amount of cores used for a VM in Qubes is only 2 cores. But even your old and weak CPU has probably at least 4 or more cores, so you just need to go into settings and up the cores for example for the vm in which you are watching/streaming movies/tv shows.
You don't need more than 16gb ram, if you don't have a very special use case. Most people make the mistake, that they look at the ram usage Qubes OS displays in the tray, but this is a known mistake of Qubes due to how Qubes work. Qubes most of the times shows there what max limit for ram for each qube is set in the settings and not how much ram is really used. So you can have only 8gb of ram and open a couple of qubes with the ram max limit set for 4gb in the settings of those qubes and Qubes OS will show you, that combined you are using maybe even 32gb of ram, which is of course not possible with only having 8gb of ram.

BTW: I use Qubes as my daily driver and not once have I used the terminal in Qubes...so people writing here, that you need to be a pro at the terminal, don't know what they are talking about or have a very special use case that is FAR from a regular user.
My advice for people wanting to use Qubes OS:

Read and understand especially the part of the documentation about "Inheritance and persistence" and do the same for Qubes-Whonix and by that I mean especially how to update your Tor Browser correctly in Qubes-Whonix.
Don't forget, that you can ask AI about Qubes OS, so that will help you also.

Odd

After months with secure blue I switched to bazzite not for the gaming stuff but cause I wanted something that just works iut of the box cause I had to focus on other stuff at this moment. I'll probably start to using a custom image with bluebuild based on bazzite with some highly opinionated customization.

dryfter

                   ##  **                     dryfter@macbook-air
                *####****.                    -------------------
                  ###,                        OS: Fedora Linux Asahi Remix 44 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) aarch64
               ...,/#,,,..                    Host: Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M2, 2022)
          /*,,,,,,,,*,........,,              Kernel: Linux 7.0.13-400.asahi.fc44.aarch64+16k
        ,((((((//*,,,,,,,,,......             Uptime: 17 hours, 51 mins
       ((((((((((((((%............            Packages: 5 (appman), 43 (flatpak-system), 1 (flatpak-user), 3056 (rpm), 4 (snap)
     ,(((((((((((((((@@(............          Shell: zsh 5.9
    (((((((((((((((((@@@@/............        Display (Built-in Screen): 2560x1664 @ 1.49x in 14", 60 Hz [Built-in]
  ,((((((((((((((((((@@@@@&*...........       DE: KDE Plasma 6.7.0
 ((((((((((((((((((((@@@@@@@&,...........     WM: KWin (Wayland)
(((((((((((((((((((((@@@&%&@@@%,..........    WM Theme: Breeze
 /(((((((((((((((((((@@@&%%&@@@@(........     Theme: oxygen (Oxygen) [Qt], Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3/4]
    ,((((((((((((((((@@@&&@@&/&@@@/..         Icons: oxygen [Qt], Colloid-Dark [GTK2], oxygen [GTK3/4]
        /((((((((((((@@@@@@/.../&&            Font: Lexie Readable (10pt) [Qt], Lexie Readable (10pt) [GTK2/3/4]
           .(((((((((@@@@(....                Cursor: Oxygen_Black (48px)
               /(((((@@#...                   Terminal: yakuake 26.4.2
                  .((&,                       CPU: Apple M2 (8) @ 3.20 GHz
                                              GPU: Apple M2 (10) @ 1.40 GHz [Integrated]
                                              Memory: 6.41 GiB / 7.32 GiB (88%)
                                              Swap: 6.37 GiB / 16.00 GiB (40%)
                                              Disk (/): 284.91 GiB / 345.91 GiB (82%) - btrfs
                                              Local IP (enu1u3u1): 192.168.0.196/24
                                              Battery (bq40z651): 76% [AC Connected]
                                              Power Adapter: 35W
                                              Locale: en_US.utf8

IndigoMizumi

I dual boot Windows 10 and Linux Mint on my main desktop. I'm sticking with Windows 10 as long as I can but I may plan to migrate to Linux in a more full-time capacity.

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