[pgaddict]

I'm using Qubes OS as my primary for years - I think I started with the 2.0 release in 2014 (I might have tried/used the 1.0 release, I don't recall.) and I was immediately hooked.

I understand the usual story is that the goal is security benefits, and the compartmentalization (or rather the implied inconvenience) is the price for that. But for me the compartmentalization turned out to be a benefit on it's own, and actually convenient.

I find it extremely convenient to have multiple isolated / virtual workspaces for different stuff, even if you assume attackers / malice do not exist. Having separate VMs is not the same as having separate folders. I also love the VM templates, which allow me to do all kinds of experiments (e.g. install packages in the app VM, which disappear after restart). Or run VMs with a mix of distros/versions/... Yes, I could do some of that with plain VMs, but Qubes integrates that in a way that I find very convenient. The commands for copying stuff between VMs are muscle memory at this point.

Yes, there are limitations, like the lack of GPU acceleration. But movies in 1080p play just fine without it, and I'm not a gamer, so I don't mind much. I can't play with CUDA etc. on these QubesOS machines, and scrolling web pages with large images is laggy, but I find this to be an acceptable price.

I went through multiple laptops / workstations over the years, and the situation improved a lot I think. Initially I had to solve quite a few issues with installer, some hardware not working (or requiring setting something special), or poor battery life on the laptops. But after a while that mostly either went away, especially once I switched to laptops with official Linux support (Dell Precision were good, I'm on Thinkpad P1 G7 now). The battery life is pretty decent too (especially once I disabled HT in BIOS).

Is it perfect for everyone? No, certainly not. But it sure is great for me, and I hope they keep working on it.

[vigilans]

I’m in the same boat.

Love the compartmentalization and being able to route VMs to different network backends and the ability to create ephemeral domains for quick tasks.

Thank you Joanna, Marek, Andrew, and all the wonderful contributors. I couldn’t live without Qubes.

[irundebian]

> scrolling web pages with large images is laggy

Now that I've read this, I can also remember that I was also annoyed by jerks when scrolling web pages.

I also found the backup management too complicated. I didn't want to back up entire VMs, just the data within the VMs. In principle, I would have had to start up all VMs for backups and run a backup script for each individual VM.

[pgaddict]

I only noticed the jerky scrolling on pages with a lot of images, particularly hires + CSS effects (blur etc.). Everything else feels OK to me (I'm sure it could be smoother, but it's not too bad so I haven't noticed).

For backups, I don't them the qubes way, I do "regular" backups within VM using rsync/duplicity/... When moving to a new machine I prefer to setup everything from scratch (and then restore the data). And it gives me all the features like incremental backups etc.