On Saturday, December 10, 2016 at 9:16:58 AM UTC-5, Jean-Philippe Ouellet wrote: > On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 7:45 PM, Andrew David Wong wrote: > > On 2016-12-08 21:11, Jean-Philippe Ouellet wrote: > >> On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 6:37 AM, Andrew David Wong wrote: > >>> Qubes isn't supported on VirtualBox or on Macbooks > >> > >> This is the first I've heard of MacBooks being "not supported". > >> > > > > By "not supported," I mean that there are a lot of known problems > > specific to Macbook compatibility, and we don't have any particular > > commitment to changing Qubes in order to fix/circumvent those problems. > > > >> I know at least one person personally who is currently running > >> Qubes on a recent (<2yo) MacBook, and it is completely usable. > >> > > > > "Not supported" does not (and has never) meant "unusable" or "cannot > > be done." I'm not sure why you would think it does. (Frankly, your > > interpretation is uncharitable, given that I pointed out that there > > are threads on accomplishing each one separately and that it might be > > possible through DIY hacking.) > > Err, perhaps it came across wrong. My intention was simply to claim > from first-hand accounts that Qubes is in fact more usable on MacBooks > than it may be given credit for :)
See this recent article, "Linux on the Mac -- state of the union": https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/ The statement "Bringup on Macs is a challenge .... Supporting new hardware generally takes about two years, anything older can be expected to work decently," matches my experience. A consistent issue has been that ACPI tables often have something wrong that either Xen or Linux notices (more often Xen). A more recent challenge is the use of SPI for keyboard and the lack of a fully working driver (initial workaround: plug in a USB keyboard). Qubes compatibility is roughly parallel with Linux compatibility (although Qubes lags at the bleeding edge). Whether running Qubes or some Linux distribution, you often need to make changes to an "out of the box" install to get everything working on a Mac. Sometimes you have to do some fairly low level mucking about (ranging from building additional drivers, replacing a wifi adapter with a Linux-friendly one, patching ACPI tables, to writing quirks for and rebuilding the Xen hypervisor). Getting Qubes to even install on a Mac can be a challenge, and even if it installs, there is often more to be done after that. In years past, I think the Bootcamp feature provided some pressure to maintain non-OSX compatibility, but that seems to be slipping further away with each Macbook generation. I would _not_ recommend a Mac for Qubes unless: (1) someone has already shown a particular Mac model works with Qubes (and shared the details of how they got it to work); or (2) you are very comfortable with the "banging a square peg into a round hole" process of massaging/forcing Linux to work on a computer that is almost, but not quite, compatible with Linux, as you will pretty much have to sort it out on your own (all manner of esoteric things like: Why won't the installer boot and how do I deal with it? Why is the keyboard not working? Why do I only get 72 minutes of battery when MacOS gets 7 hours? Why won't the display wake from sleep? My wifi card doesn't seem to be recognized - how do I fix that when I don't have any networking devices? Why isn't Vt-d working, although the Intel website says my CPU provides it? How can I dual boot MacOS and Qubes?). For some, I suppose (2) could count as "usable," but not for the vast majority of users. Eric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/f807fa75-226d-4c16-b1dc-61191b156db7%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
