[Topfi]

Blast from the past for me, though primarily interacted with the complementary Whonix side of things. Not surprising to read, considering how lean Qubes was from the get-go designed to be it makes sense that most things are from resulting upstream rather than with their code.

Fully aware that it was never the goal for Qubes, but I have never been able to shake the idea that one could leverage their architecture in ways beyond security hardening, especially that screenshot with MSFT Office running in its own guest got my mind spinning back then. Might be worth revisiting some old ideas I'm just recalling, especially with there having been over a decade in development across many projects focused on hypervisors by many smart people, making a few old experiments likely less impossible.

[james_hsiao]

I had the exact same thought back in the day. The security isolation is obviously the main selling point, but the way Qubes handles seamless GUI integration across completely separate domains is technically beautiful.

With modern CPUs having much better hardware virtualization support than a decade ago, building a developer-focused OS that leverages that same compartmentalization (e.g., isolating different client environments or dependency hells without dealing with Docker's quirks) feels a lot more viable now.

[mfro]

Ehhh, I think most engineers that actually want this are pretty accepting of their current tooling and wouldn’t want to switch to a whole new Linux distribution just for a slightly more seamless experience. Besides, the people who care are always pushing forward to make the UX better — see devcontainers, Apple Containers, WSL, etc.