Hello fellow Qubesers, Qubes continues to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and makes me want to share it with the world.
I've been quite busy with real-world things recently and had to use several different printers & scanners. Prior experience has conditioned me to expect frustration, or at least annoyance. On windows I have memories of disabling driver signature enforcement, installing some big printer "drivers" from totally unauthenticatable sources, which then actually come with bloated desktop applications with features like "scan with your webcam". (Hello scanner company: if that worked well, then nobody would buy your scanners or install their drivers!) Oh, and the fancy ink level reporting dialogues saying things like "You have -60012% cyan ink left! Click <dead link> to buy more now!" - those are great. On OS X I remember the days of force-killing the printer app as the UI blocks indefinitely while waiting for a reply from the printer which isn't coming. Or the network printer which somehow gets a different DHCP lease every day resulting in a list of 20 saved printers "helpfully" auto-discovered and persisted, all with the same name, all indistinguishable in the UI, but only one of which actually works. On various Linuxes & *BSDs, I remember wrestling for days on every install to get lpd and cups working, and then dealing with differences in postscript parsers causing messed up formatting, and stupid udev rules running things of massive complexity as root so that your scanner would have a really easy time if it wanted to compromise you... *sigh* On Qubes, it's a completely different story. First, I pass my USB printer or scanner through to a DispVM. To print, I just copy the file to the DispVM, open it with anything, and print it, and the printer is automatically found and "just works" (thanks Fedora). To scan: I pass the printer to a DispVM, open simple-scan, click the scan button, and it just works! When I'm happy with my scan, I copy it out of the DispVM and then convert to trusted PDF! So far every printer or scanner just works the first time, I haven't needed to look under the hood for anything. With sys-usb, DispVMs, and convert-to-trusted-pdf I feel reasonably confident that if the printers or scanners were malicious, the worst they could do is mutate my documents or store them for later retrieval by an adversary (which is an inherent problem with any commodity printer and totally unrelated to the OS used to interface with). This would be even more true with a stateless laptop without any persistent mutable firmware for the USB controllers, and when sys-usb can act like a DispVM itself without hacks (R4?). Qubes may be far from my theoretically ideal OS, but it absolutely hits a pragmatic sweet spot improving security *and* usability simultaneously. Might I dare re-purpose a colored slogan and say Qubes is truly "making computers great again"? :P Sincerely, Jean-Philippe </rant> Now back to work... -- 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/CABQWM_CAYGPW2bxNoRa1oS%2BYVrbQHw6qReAWg1%3DRi6dxZQbWGQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
