My quick guess is that you need 2GiB more RAM with Qubes0S than with, say, Ubuntu. Reasoning:
a. Experience: 6GiB with Ubuntu was somewhat usable, but I had to close all apps I was not using at the time and even with this, I got some swapping times. With 8GiB, it was much better. With QubesOS, I got similar experience for 8GiB (swapping times) and 10GiB (good experience). But please note that my experience with 10GiB RAM is quite short: I have used it few days because of a faulty RAM module. (10GiB was actually a temporary downgrade from 16GiB.) b. Calculation: By default, dom0 takes at least 1GiB RAM. Both sys-net and sys-firewall and sys-usb can be configured for 200 or 300 MiB. Plus some overhead. Note that Qubes 4 will probably add about 50MiB overhead for each VM except HVMs (the overhead is alreasy there) and dom0 (no need for stubdom). On the other hand, you can make some further modifications that same some RAM. * If you don't need USB for anything but keyboard and mouse (or touchpad or something similar), you can get rid of sys-usb. * You might merge sys-net and sys-firewall in one VM. Yes, some will note that this is generally a bad idea. While I agree it reduces some benefits of Qubes, merging sys-net with sys-firewall should not make it worse than conventional distributions. * You might try MirageOS-based firewall to reduce its footprint. But please note that this is experimental today. Also note that QubesOS is not designed for swapping. All AppVMs have 1GiB swap and you can theoretically add more, but memory balancing does not work well if swap is used heavily. I would say that you will be able to run Qubes with 4GiB RAM if your requirements are pretty low. It might be worth trying. But I would not recommend any laptop with non-upgradable 4GiB RAM as a new hardware for QubesOS. Regards, Vít Šesták 'v6ak' -- 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 qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/064e6e6c-78ea-4175-8635-b0b6224d88f6%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
