@alberto
I respect your opinion but I don‘t understand why some people here on this
forum read so much into things ("They are ashamed of being...blabla").
What‘s your point?
If you had taken the time to read a little more than you would know that
„they“ also prefer hardware that can be audited/isn‘t possibly
backdoored, that they are opposed to Intel‘s ME, that they would use
corbeoot/libreboot and so on. There are many discussions and blog posts
regarding these topics.
The OS itself can be too much at first but with anything in life you got to
try and read in order to gain knowledge. The interface isn‘t messed at all.
In my mind it is pretty clever and is in constant development so useful
features can be added.
You are right in saying that a powerful machine would be best but be careful
because you would have to meet other requirements in order to be able to use
some or all features (especially with regard to virtualization). Even with a
less powerful machine one should be able to get a nice setup working. There
are different VM in development or even usable right now but you have to
search a little for the projects (e.g. Mirage firewall that uses 32MB of
RAM).
Who needs dual boot anymore? Who needs a CD/DVD-ROM these days? You could use
a caddy and swap drives for different use cases.
My understanding is that gaming and GPU intensive tasks are difficult at the
moment but I haven‘t really tried.
I think that the Qubes OS is one of the if not the most interesting OS out
there. You have to invest time in order to appreciate all its features and
possibilities. If you do, I think you will be surprised.
Does the average Joe need it? No, but you have to ask yourself what do you
need? One of the most popular passwords in use is something like 12345. Most
people don‘t have a clue what they are doing online and they don‘t mind
until something happens. So, where do you start? Probably not with the Qubes
OS but you might end up there because cybercrime is on the rise and your
right to privacy is being restricted more and more these days. With Qubes you
can combine different approaches on one machine, for example, use VM that are
not connected to the internet, making it very hard to get exploited. This
could be office work, password manager, data-/mail archive...anything you can
think of. Each of these things has its own VM not connected to each other.
You can use different VM for surfing the net. You can connect one VM to a VPN
and leave another one to the clearnet. You could use a TOR VM in order to
acquire bitcoins, you can create a bitcoin-wallet VM. There are lots of
approaches for your everyday use.
As far as I know it is even possible to use libreboot or coreboot for Qubes
on the ASUS board. I think I remember some people talking about using it
already.
