Qubes OS

What hackers pick instead

• OpenBSDA stable, security-focused Unix with simple configuration, excellent documentation and painless upgrades, though critics note limited hardware support, slower performance, and a minimalism that inflates its security reputation.248recommend
• TailsRecommended for anonymity and privacy, it boots from a USB stick and leaves no trace on the host machine. One critic says it is too complicated for average consumers.14recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 286 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Qubes had some great security design and implemented it the only way time/funds would allow: by cobbling together a lot of unfortunately very complex and broken things

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”

2. QubesOS falls really short in supply chain integrity, and server solutions, but IMO the overall hypervisor/IOMMU isolation architecture is the most practical

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Former CIA spy: agency's tools can takeover your phone, TV, and even your car”

3. with some effort you can get a really nice stack with segmented git, disposable coding agents, package cachers, firewalls, and network visibility

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets”

4. I love what they're doing and it's my preferred daily driver, but from a security standpoint they're still pushing molasses up a sandy hill.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable”

5. Qubes OS is inherently vastly more vulnerable than GrapheneOS, in large part precisely because of their different approaches to hardware.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “F-Droid Board of Directors nominations 2026”

6. Give Qubes OS a shot. It's significantly less challenging to run than it used to be, and a (small, I admit) number of us daily drive it.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Ask HN: How to deal with security implications of running/installing projects?”

7. Qubes is great but at the end of the day cannot protect against evil maid attacks to the level that pixel or apple phones can.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “F-Droid Board of Directors nominations 2026”

8. Qubes is one specific approach to a problem not suitable for all goals, it's useful for hobbyists who use browsers and such.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Chromium Has Merged JpegXL”

9. there is something really nice about being able to run different applications over Tor, VPN or plain internet simultaneously

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel”

10. Qubes has tighter isolation than android does, but is slower and too much of a hassle for your typical employee or relative.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “LineageOS 24”

11. I do run Qubes, and a compromised router, e.g., will not get access to any passwords that I store in an offline VM as text

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple”

12. Everything else has worse security almost by definition (since you can virtualize it and increase its security that way).

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Google just gave Android power users a sideloading win”

13. it also relies on the hardware-assisted virtualization (VT-d), which is virtually unbreakable compared to anything else

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “OpenBSD 7.9 Released”

14. The most secure way presently is to use qubes-os that allows to use a very hardened VM to run individual applications.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg”

15. even though QubesOS attack surface is so tiny (well-designed to be secure) there are still vulnerabilities to be found

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel”

16. temporary disposable virtual machines in QubesOS to isolate those kinds of activities from my more vulnerable systems

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ask HN: Securing Pip and NPM package use?”

17. Perhaps is a good solution. But the focus is in a solution very easy to adopt and your proposal requires the qube OS.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Now Is the Perfect Time to Change Sudo”

18. If someone pwns your personal browser they should pop out into an environment where nothing exists but that browser

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”

19. any offline vault VM storing secrets stayed secure. This is just not happening with any other security approach.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Chromium Has Merged JpegXL”

20. I run Qubes as a daily driver according to the docs, and my workflow was not vulnerable to the discussed attack.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities”

21. there's no excuse not to run Qubes if you're familiar with Linux and can afford a compatible desktop or laptop

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Privacy and control. My tech setup”

22. isolates untrusted software using strong hardware virtualization. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit”

23. this is a good OS but mainly because using it will be a little impossible without considering certain things

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “QubesOS – The best defense against (supply chain) attacks”

24. Android and Qubes are right. The app/vm, and whatever it tries, should not be considered trusted by default.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust”

25. compartmentalized operating systems like Qubes are the future for defending against these kinds of attacks

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Axios Compromised on NPM – Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan”

26. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on compartmentalization. Qubes OS does this right.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?”

27. Choose security through compartmentalization (instead of security through correctness that never works)

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Chromium Has Merged JpegXL”

28. In Qubes you use VMs to separate your banking environment from the one where you pull npm dependencies

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Toro: Deploy Applications as Unikernels”

29. QubesOS largely exists to work around the extreme insecurity of traditional desktop operating systems.

    Recommends · Nov 2025

30. the guest VMs which run traditional desktop OSes are generally much less secure than mobile OSes

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple”

31. Qubes doesn't solve this either, IIRC the apps running in VMs are glued to the host with X11 forwarding without any acceleration support.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C”

32. it was awkward, limited, had major performance problems, and yet never managed to fully prevent circumvention

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Linux Zoom client proactively reading everything written to X11 clipboard”

33. this bug is so bad that it seems like an infiltration of Qubes at best or Qubes being a honeypot at worst

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel”

34. The Qubes OS team has allowed significant Xen vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for weeks to months

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “F-Droid Board of Directors nominations 2026”

35. it runs Apps/OS in secure sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem worse than the terrible MacOS 26 performance

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)”

36. It's an amazing feeling to feel in full control over your computing and not being afraid to open any links or attachments.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Chromium Has Merged JpegXL”

37. We have good relationships with a bunch of legitimate privacy and security projects including QubesOS, secureblue, Molly

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple”

38. no desktop OS other than Qubes and MacOS (to a very limited extent) can handle the user being even vaguely compromised

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “BlueHammer abuses Windows Defender's update process to gain SYSTEM access”

39. how lean Qubes was from the get-go designed to be it makes sense that most things are from resulting upstream

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Qubes OS Security in the Public Record”

40. consider Qubes OS running on hardware with excellent security features, and the two being tightly integrated

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable”