Qubes OS - anybody tried it? On which hardware and how did you find it?

Apparently Qubes hardware compatibility is quite narrow; but the concept does fascinate me. If I could ever afford a machine which I knew it ran on, I’d surely want to!

Comments on experience with this appreciated - thanks :slight_smile:

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I’ve tried running it on my Acer laptop, on an Intel Nuc and an Asus desktop, in all cases the installation failed and I tried different memory sticks, insuring I was using dd correctly, checking guides, ect.

The only reason I use VMs ontop of CentOS is because I can’t get Qubes to work :confused:

On a side note… I think it’s really intended for Intel processors or that’s the vibe I get from the documentation.

Would love to hear people’s experiences too…

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Thanks for your feedback. One of the reasons why I mentioned cost is it seems that the higher end Lenovos and Dells were pretty-much the only models consistently stated as compatible with it and they’re quite pricey. I find Acer more affordable and generally very compatible with Linux. I also would prefer to use AMD for both CPU and GPU in future, so if Qubes OS has difficulty with that, then that would be unfortunate.

I installed it on a System76 Lemur 6 laptop. There was a PCI card issue though so I installed PopOS back over it. I’ve just gotten a Dell Optiplex 990 MiniTower which according to the Qubes website is supposed to run Qubes well. I will try installing Qubes on it this weekend.

What I’d like to know is what is a currently manufactured laptop that runs it well. If anyone knows please tell me. I’ve heard Librem 14 runs it but haven’t been able to confirm.

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Attempted to install Qubes R4 on the Dell Optiplex 990 and it said the hardware wasn’t supported. So I installed Debian Buster on it instead.

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I think the difficulty is if it’s so hardware specific, with both hardware and software components changing so frequently, how can we ever predict it will work on a machine we purchase for that purpose?

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