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by ubercow 3199 days ago
Interesting. I'd love to know more about workflows around a setup like this.

Is it possible to use Xen as traditional desktop OS with Keyboard/Mouse/Monitor running X and a Window Manager? Would you run it in a Dom0 or DomU? How would you switch between them, etc.

2 comments

Might be worth looking into QubesOS[1]. It uses Xen to compartmentalize things. Never used it myself though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS

I often go back and give Qubes_OS a try but then it lets me down with USB passthrough for a lot of devices I need - not least a USB tethered Internet connection (or USB Networking). It just is so complicated that I gave up and I'll look again when they get to version 4.
Not sure what the status is now, but many years ago I explored Xen CLient, which runs Xen as the base OS, but lets you run VMs with full hardware support (direct graphics card access etc) as your 'desktop' OS and switch between them.

It was originally marketed as a mechanism for running a Corporate OS and a Personal OS simultaneously, with both of them running at within about 5% of native performance.