Privacy benefits aside, does qubes run better than a typical vm like virtualbox? I tend to fiddle with distros a lot and I feel qubes might be a good choice, though I’m wondering about how efficient it is
It’s faster than virtualbox because there is lower recourse use from the base system and it uses qemu. Qemu/kvm is the fastest option for vms on Linux, but it isn’t exklusiv to qubes, you can also use it via the terminal on any distro or with a GUI like gnome boxes
It uses the Xen hypervisor, not qemu/KVM. Technically it is a Xen kernel virtualizing Linux since it is a type 1 hypervisor.
Xen uses qemu for HVM guests afaik
Is there any info about how much the base system uses?
Not that I know, but you could spin up two VMs on your current system, one with Qubes and one with base fedora and compare the performance of vm’s
yeah i was just wondering if there was a quick chart somewhere so i could be lazy
Probably, yes. Qubes AppVMs don’t run the whole DE inside it. Also, Qubes uses automatic memory balancing for VMs, so users doesn’t need to care about it much.
What is a “typical VM”?
Qubes uses the type-1 Xen hypervisor that runs at a similar privilege to the kernel of other OSes. KVM is a type-1 hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor that runs in userspace. Of these three, Xen is the most performant hypervisor because virtualization is all it does.
If by “typical VM” you mean a guest OS running inside a window of the host OS, then Qubes will always come out on top because the graphics pipeline is much less of a bottleneck.
AFAIK it has very limited hardware support.
It is not like ‘very limited’. But generally they are focused around modern Intel CPU, and can have issues on new AMD CPU. And it won’t work on very old CPUs without proper virtualization features.
https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/ can hint on what Qubes will work better.
Also see the system requirements: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/
Are you referring to Qubes OS? If so, what do you mean exactly with hardware support?
KVM and virt-manager are faster than VirtualBox.
QubesOS uses a dedicated Hypervisor, Xen, which has this as its only job so I assume it is fast.
