- Distribution: QubesOS 4.3
- Desktop Environment: Xfce
- Theme: Redmond97-SE
- Window Manager: Xmonad
- Terminal: xterm + tmux
- Launcher: Rofi^1^
- Bar: xfce4-panel
Windows
Top-left to bottom right:
- neovim "IDE" with integrated terminal editing dotfiles (Debian)
dom0admin terminal (Fedora)- Qubes Manager looking at some templates (Fedora)
- Thunar File manager about to move a file between qubes (Whonix)
- Konform Browser browsing codeberg (Arch Linux)
Each app and window can belong to a separate qube (Xen VM), visually discriminated by differing color schemes.
Thanks to Ben Grandes qusal which was very helpful as base for setting things up.
This is a setup optimized for productivity and efficiency, which is reflected in the lack of eye-candy and gratuitous margins.
^1^: Not pictured - I figured the screenshot was busy enough. If y'all want to see more LMK.
Getting a lot of benefits from it. I'm a happy user!
If I mostly talk about downsides in order to keep this brief:
It can work fine to just install and start using out of the box as it is, even for Linux noobs. You can get pretty far without having to dig super deep. But to really customize it you get into things like Salt management (or figuring out an alternative) and building your own templates. This can take a lot of time and effort. Consider it "playing on hard mode". For me it's fine since I enjoy these things and you can take it bit by bit. Lots of helpful stuff shared in the community like the repo I linked.
It's not 100% jank-free. More niche things like ZFS integration, GPU passthrough and sys-gui qubes take some tweaking or even patching depending on your hardware and use and I have run into bugs with all of those. Chaining Tor and DNS on some IPv6 networks is still not all there but looked like WIP last I checked in.
Would love if they manage to migrate away from github.com...
That said, things are indeed steadily improving and people generally seem helpful and constructive when I look at the issue tracker^1^. I think it's worth giving it another chance now that 4.3 is out.
^1^: Example: Didn't have to report those bugs myself as someone beat me to it. And fixes for most did come in.