Qubes OS 4.0 has been released

[Posted March 28, 2018 by ris]

The security-focused distribution Qubes OS has released version 4.0. "This release delivers on the features we promised in our announcement of Qubes 4.0-rc1, with some course corrections along the way, such as the switch from HVM to PVH for most VMs in response to Meltdown and Spectre. For more details, please see the full Release Notes."

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Qubes OS 4.0 has been released

Posted Mar 29, 2018 21:45 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]

I've met a lot of people who make fun of the "Linux desktop people", and I understand their perspective. It takes a certain kind of person to commit to running an operating system where you have no real idea if after performing a system update your laptop will still suspend (for example).

But QubesOS is a great example of real innovation in the Linux desktop space. I believe that if used by a savvy computer user (particularly sysadmins), Qubes provides a significant amount of security. Their goals of forking out from just the desktop though seem...very ambitious.

As someone who's been working on "general purpose" Linux from Debian originally to now Fedora/RHEL - I'd love to see some of the DNA behind the core stack https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/10/03/core3/ make its way into other distributions. Something like having the current OS (dom0) be itself a template; a way to launch an installed dom0 app as an AppVM and do the "window border" coloring just for it?

A challenge with adopting any of the Qubes tech for a general purpose system is that we need to support being virtualized to start; think people developing Kubernetes apps on MacOS using a Linux VM in Vagrant, and on the flip side, as a server deployed in a IaaS style cloud. For example, the bit where Qubes ships a wrapper for yum that does the downloads in a VM is cool, but not something we can really make the default. Even where nested virtualization is available (like it now is in GCE), I'm not sure I'd want to *require* it for critical functionality (as opposed to testing).

Anyways I could write a lot more here but I have work to do too (hopefully some of which will benefit Fedora being a Qubes guest!). So I'll just say congrats on the release, and for people who haven't looked at Qubes it's very much worth doing so if you fit the target audience.