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by MichaelGG 4447 days ago
I've recently switched to using VMWare for everything, and disabling networking on the host (use a pfSense VM for networking). It's quite handy, but still feels a bit heavyweight. Of course, I'm sort of forced to run Windows as the host to ensure best driver/battery support.

I really hope these approaches like Qubes take off and that things get optimized for this type of workload. I'm not sure why Microsoft has ignored lightweight virtualization, both on client and server.
1 comments
ComputerGuru 4447 days ago
That sounds great, but how many other virtual machines are you using, what is your heuristic for deciding what task is run in which virtual machine, and how strict are you about which sensitive data is used on multiple VMs?

(note: genuinely curious. I've gone down this route before myself before realizing there was simply too much overlap between my "sensitive" and "normal" work. I still employ similar configurations but for protection against data corruption, ease of system administration, and R&D purposes only.)

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MichaelGG 4447 days ago
Right now, just games/junk browsing, home (personal email, browsing, projects), work (per customer). On Windows I use Sandboxie to further isolate things like browsers.

It's not perfect, but at least when a client wants me to run some damn .exe to join their oh-so-great screen-sharing platform, my home environment isn't messed up. And I can run random games or utilities and quickly revert to a snapshot.

The most sensitive keys stay in the host partition.

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