Qubes OS 3.2 - not ready for prime time

After a few days tinkering around with Qubes OS 3.2 I must say that I am very impressed. It is an awesome operating system and has a lot of interesting use cases. I will not be able to use it as my main operating system, though. There are several reasons for that:

Poor hardware support - I sometimes need hardware acceleration from my two graphic cards, and Qubes OS does not support this, unless you create a HVM and pass-through one of the cards. HVMs do not work like PVMs, though - and have given me trouble on all three instances that I used HVMs. This poor hardware support also causes xorg in dom0 to run at about 25% to 40% CPU usage at all times, with no VMs started. That's not good. This is on an i7, mind you.

The double-edged sword - while the security architecture is amazing, it also causes some issues when you want to do some penetration testing for instance. There is no easy way to quickly lower security on any VM, so you have to setup new net and proxy vms for all of your penetration testing needs.

So for now I have installed Qubes on a USB drive and will use that for some presentations, but for my main system I'm going to go back to Archlinux for now. I will keep a close eye on Qubes in the future, though.

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