On Saturday, February 10, 2018 at 5:05:17 PM UTC+1, bill...@gmail.com wrote: > I'm in a slightly similar situation. I am a very new Qubes user and am in > the process of getting used to it. My impression is that Qubes right now is > a little like linux in general in the 1990s. I can remember running linux on > my boxes and I could do about 70% of what I needed to do, but there was > always something that I had to do in Windows. Then 80%. Then 90%. Then > 95%. And now, the *only* thing I use Windows for is to check my PowerPoint > format lectures that I created with LibreOffice on linux to make sure that > there are no font changes that screw up the screen formatting. And I don't > even do that if the venue allows me to use my own laptop for presentations. > > So, the same thing seems to be true here. The developers of this system have > done an amazing job and have a tremendous idea. But you always solve the big > easy problems first. I have found that I can use Qubes for about 85% of > what I want to do. I can run LibreOffice, analytical programs, compilers, > email, and surf the web. Videos work fine out of the box for me. > > What doesn't work is the 3D graphics. I'm having an issue with some games, > the Blender modeling program, Paraview, and stuff like that. Image > processing and image manipulation (e.g. GIMP, Hugin, etc.) all work fine. > > That's not a deal killer for me. Currently, I run KDE Neon as my base OS, > and it works great -- but I don't pay much attention to security on it. I > dual boot with Windows 10 for the PowerPoint thing, and now Qubes (on an > external hard drive) for fun and maybe more in the future. I'm slowly moving > more and more of my work over to the Qubes installation. > > Thinking back to the "old" linux days, it seemed that making linux an OS that > you *really* could use for everything took the involvement of some major > investors. Linux had been bumping along at about 80% useful until a bunch of > major companies decided to start dumping money into development -- and then > it jumped to about 95% in just a couple of years. Anyway, that's how I > remember it. > > My impression is that Qubes is going to be a little like that. The amount of > effort and talent it takes to pull off something like that is pretty mind > boggling. With linux, you have people in the open source community who have > devoted 20 years to some damn little subsystem that nobody really thinks > about until they don't work. How long did Eric Raymond work on fetchmail or > sed or gpsd? > > Personally, I am stunned that the folk here have pulled this off as well as > they have. And God bless them for it. But there's an old saw in my business > that it's trivial to set up a system that works 80% of the time, easy to make > one that works 90% of the time, very, very hard to get to 95%, and almost > impossible to get to 99%. What that means to me is that Qubes will likely > never be at that 99% as long as the people currently working on it are the > sum total of the resources devoted to it. It will just very slowly creep up > now that they are dealing with the really hard, really labor intensive small > incremental stuff. > > However, there's always the chance that a Canonical or Apache or Sun or > Oracle will come along and say "Hey, this is a good idea. Let's dump a > hundred million bucks into it and see what happens." Then it will move to > the next level. > > I don't know, of course, but that's the pattern I've seen before. In the > meantime, my solution is to use a very easy, but not all that secure, OS for > my graphics-intensive stuff, and don't do anything on it that I care about > security for. Personally, I use KDE neon because I like KDE, but I'm also a > fan of fedora. > > The thing about security, though, is that almost all of the linux variants > are good "enough" for most things -- as long as you don't do something > stupid. Qubes is good because it mitigates the damage when you do stupid > stuff, not really because it is this totally different linux. > Compartmentalization is great, but if you download apps from > "let_me_screw_with_your_computer.com", you will always have problems. And > that behavioral stuff is where most problems come from now. Look at the > recent arrests of folk on the dark web, or more recently the studies in > tracking bitcoin transactions. How was this done? Because people use the > same identifiers in the dark web for open transactions. There's no technology > that will save you from that kind of thing. > > I have also started storing my data on the Qubes side of things, but that > requires booting into Qubes, copying to a flash drive, and then booting into > KDE neon. Cheap laptops are pretty cheap now, so I'm thinking about dropping > $400 into another box and running Qubes on one and KDE neon on the other...
Glad to read this, it's always interesting to read others insightful perspective, especially for something so interesting as Qubes OS. Your view is very refreshing, for example the point that it's amazing just how smooth and well Qubes works, when taking into consideration how complex it is, and how many others tend to fail to make good working systems before that. Thinking about what you said, I realized it's also easy to take Qubes for granted on the reliability side of things after having used it for a while, forgetting how cumber-stone some other OS's out there can be. -- 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/2a45a5fe-1634-4be7-a358-d4bb66188182%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
