Qubes OS

Reader supplied reviews for Qubes OS Average rating 8.9 from 44 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Qubes OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 4.3.04.2.44.1.23.2.121.0 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 4.2.4 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-11-11 Votes: 7 I like it. All features have worked for me using a MSI motherboard based tower, Minis forum mini-computer, Dell Optiplex, Lenovo Thinkbook and Thinkpad. Using laptops with integrated graphics are great for a 42 inch (non-networked, not 'SMART') TV/monitors. Disposable virtual machines are such a great way to work. I use this distribution for non-gaming applications. There has been much discussion and activity on the use of secure firmware in computers which seems to be the next best advance in this concept of secure systems. Templates based on debian, fedora, archlinux, gentoo, and whonix are solid and full featured. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 4.2.4 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-10-14 Votes: 6 Up front to clarify actually using 4.3 release candidate but not in pull down yet even though its stable enough to be my daily driver already. With some discipline and knowledge Qubes OS is simply put the most secure operating system (at least networked) available for any price. With the defaults and some reading I supposed newer *nix users could use it well but really do need to be a power user to get the most out of it. Things like increasing your dom0 to 10+ gig of memory for a decent sized ARC and so you can run most of your cubes with dedup on ZFS are not things you get out of the box but are so worth it. Bit of a VM junkie in general and have like 40 different BSDs, distros, and other OSes running as mostly stand alones I fire up from time to time to play with. For many users probably better off sticking with something like CachyOS and use KVM for the odd VM or two. Especially if you are looking for maximum graphics performance with wayland and such for gaming. But if you are serious about maximum security and cpu/disk performance from multiple concurrent OSes then KVM doesn't hold a candle to Xen. I am so confident in how well QubesOS ring fences things I even play around with Chinese distros like openKylin and Deepin which no way do I risk borderline trojan horses like that with KVM. Xen is for those ready to go full enterprise even on their home rig. For those of us who spend more on memory instead of GPUs. QubesOS leverages Xen in the most secure way possible for a true secure desktop experience. Maybe not the most user friendly (but not bad honestly) but the most secure imo. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 4.2.4 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-08-01 Votes: 9 Qubes OS is incredibly powerful and flexible. It works very well for its designed purpose and targeted userbase while also offering advanced functionality for tinkerers. If you need the strict level of security Qubes can provide, then it's a perfect choice and the experience should be quite smooth with supported hardware and basic use cases. The OS would work great for people like journalists and activists without any additional configuration. The documentation is thorough and easy to understand and will answer most questions about Qubes OS. It is written with beginners and non-technical users in mind, while still being informative enough to explain everything in depth. The forum is also fantastic and can help troubleshoot all kinds of issues and explore use cases beyond just what this OS was designed for. Things like GPU passthrough for gaming, using VPN clients, and installing Android are all thoroughly discussed in the forum and possible to accomplish for users with some Linux experience. If you are willing to tinker and take some risks, it can be an exceptionally flexible choice for daily computing. I am using it to play video games, CAD, store passwords, work, and browse the internet. I can securely separate all of these activities into their own virtual machines with different sources for network access (airgapped, Local WiFi, VPN, Tor, etc.). I can run multiple operating systems at the same time such as Windows 11 for software that needs it and Debian or Fedora for everything else. These are benefits that no other operating system can offer in such a convenient package. There are some continuing difficulties such as full support for Windows 10 and 11, s0ix sleep, Bluetooth audio, and incremental backups. These are things that the Qubes team is actively working on, however. There are also plenty of workarounds discussed in the documentation and forums. Many of these things may even become supported within the next major release. After using it daily for two years and seeing how powerful and secure Qubes is, I don't think I could go back to a monolithic operating system. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 44 reader reviews of Qubes OS...