Qubes OS will ship pre-installed on Purism’s security-focused Librem 13 laptop

You're essentially paying a premium to have someone else install an OS for you - color me unimpressed.

Until they can get get an oss version of all the firmware it's just as secure as any off the shelf laptop with a clean install of the OS of your choosing.

If you want more security get an old Lenovo/IBM think pad mod the bios chip and get libreboot.

The cpu, graphics card, hdd, Ethernet and more have more lines of code in them than your OS kernel most likely and that code rarely gets audited even internally.

It's a tradeoff, it depends on what you're protecting against. AFAIK none of the libreboot-supported boards have VT-d, so you lose a lot of qubes's isolation features.

It'll be a great day when we can have a fully free machine (firmware-wise) with IOMMU and some auditable form of DRTM. But we're a long way from that still.

EDIT: I also doubt the markup is steep. Software people always underestimate the cost of making hardware in small quantities. These guys don't have economy of scale on their side. You could say it's expensive compared to the competition, and you'd be right, but it's not because of greedy businessmen at purism.

You can get a decent core i7/i5 OEM laptop made for about 500$ these days http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Quad-core-ultrabook-i7...

Add to that some case customization and build in their specific features like wireless "kill switches" (AKA that switch all laptops used to have when wireless used to cut your battery time by half and you needed to use them on planes) and you can still get it made well under 600$, 250-300% markup is very steep in the current hardware industry.

I some how doubt small shops like PCSpecialist in the UK sell large volumes https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/lafiteII/

And as far as QubesOS goes well it is still quite immature and has not received as much security scrutiny as say Linux. As some one who've used QubesOS for some times it's biggest downfall is the limitations of Xen in regards hardware utilization such as 3D acceleration.

QubeOS does not offer a share virtualized hardware layer which can support acceleration which means that things like 3D acceleration are done through passthrough(this to some extent is a limitation of Xen, and it's portrayed as a security feature in QOS).

Since it uses passthrough you can only assign a single AppVM to benefit from the acceleration and by default your physical GPU is assigned to Dom0 (it's actually a bit tricky to assign it to an AppVM). This leads to 3D acceleration being pretty much non existent in your actual applications and this is needed today for everything from browsing to even office use (MS Office 2013 and onward requires DX9/10 compatible GPU).

So in day to day use you end up having pretty much all of your activity either done in Dom0 or if you decide to tweak (which reduces performance considerably since your main desktop loses 3D acc.) your system in a a single AppVM which some what defeats the benefit of QOS.

And even if you have a multi GPU desktop any one who played around with multi-player single host gaming rigs using Xen and multiple GPU's knows just how much of a pain it is to do the passthrough properly, you have to ensure that the UEFI does not initializes the GPU's and once they are assigned to a guest that guest needs to be kept alive, you can't reassign those GPU's without a system reboot, and even suspending the guest might cause some issues as the GPU's are initialized.

QubesOS is great in concept but it's still a far cry from a usable general purpose OS and until they either decide to do proper hardware virtualization and reduce the amount of isolation between individual AppVM's or the hardware industry needs to build a new standard for shared passthrough (necro IRQ's!). Considering that passthrough is actually becoming more and more limited in the consumer space to prevent cheap personal computing parts from being used in the data center space I don't think that the latter very likely.

Qubes OS is very useable, as long as you don't need 3D acceleration. My solution to this is to have a seperate gaming PC that's completely untrusted.

The Qubes devs will not sacrifice the fundamental security properties of the system in the way you suggest to better service gamers.

Running YouTube at anything above 720p is difficult, 60fps isn't functional same goes for 1440/2160p.

Other applications like graphical applications, video editing, CAD etc are also non functional.

I don't know why have you brought up gaming I never did, but please don't even attempt to deny the fact that 3D acceleration is required for many many day to day use cases today that have nothing to do with gaming.

If you use MS Office for work, if you do any sort of content creation, and if you just want to enjoy HD media QubesOS is not for you and those aren't some edge cases.

Yes if you only use VIM ,Libre Doc's (And even Libre Office is using OpenCL these days for spreadsheets and many other things) and Gmail you can use QubesOS without any restrictions but if you need other thinks like for example even basic 3D modeling/slicing software for your 3D printer, Sketchup or Ligthroom well then sorry my dear.

So, all or nothing is wrong way to look at INFOSEC. I mean, if it's nation states, best to avoid computers in favor of trusted people, paper, and memory. ;) However, many methods provide a meaningful increase of security or just recoverability. Worth remembering.

This particular product: too much risk in it for me to say if it does. People are probably safer with OpenBSD or hardened Linux/BSD on high-end embedded board or old workstation.

DRTM?

Your complaints about lack of 3D acceleration seem to reflect your personal preferences, and are not an actual requirement for making use of MS Office or many other software packages. My six months of production level use provides simple proof by existence. There are some things - games included - that do need something like GPU passthrough, but your view of the situation is either outdated or simply wrong.

I think you are confusing the topic here. No one denying (ate least as far as I can tell) the isolation mechanism is good, and beyond any other approach we have seen already.

But the main problem is there . They just switched the topic for people who consider their privacy.

For example if you use windows let say it is filled with zero-day backdoors which can be useful for invading your privacy .

But when you use this laptop , yes if even your application has backdoor maybe they cannot go beyond the application layer. But for highly technical people this is non-sense (not visualization , no it is good idea, the idea of running whole system on closed source blobs) . Why ? because they have access to your data via low level backdoors.Maybe they have another level to circumvent (XEN), but it is there and adversary is in your laptop already.Effectively it is there.(It sounds for me like extremely secure environment on closed source blob, which ruins whole design)

But when we are talking about FSF approved laptop (the ones which run whole system on fsf approved software) there is no backdoor. Yes, maybe it is simpler to hack such device , but it is technical problem which should we work on, not a decision problem.

(Personally I think running secure microkernel on fsf approved laptop would be much better, but it is my opinion and since I don't have fact I am saying it in parenthesis)

So practically talking you are not improving privacy . You are improving security.

I hope I was clear enough , though I don't think so.

cmiiw

Intel's TXT framework is quite nifty not fully utilized and I'm still it's not sure if it's as good as ARM's trust zone approach. The problem is that this is/will be a very important factor in any trusted computing in the future and currently it's utterly unaudited at least publicly (and from hearsay also wasn't internally audited).

Intel is pretty much mandating AMI/AMT support within the UEFI, support for TXT/TPM/NGSCB will be also mandatory soon unless Intel open sources all of this there will never be an open source UEFI BIOS which will functional with Intel going forward. Coreboot is shipped with proprietary parts which cover it, you can use Libre but then you are stuck with a decade old hardware and there is very little hope for it to ever support modern hardware the skill set way too demanding for an OSS project without a major corporate support and without full cooperation with Intel this wont be supported. If AMD was smart they would jump on this train, but as BIOS is quite a tricky business these days (probably even more complicated than OS internals with the exception of maybe really low level kernel stuff) I just don't think they want to take that risk considering their financial state.

The OEM vendors don't make this in some basement in Shenzhen it is done very professionally and the level of customization that those laptop give the user is unparalleled today.

The PCSpec laptop's I've seen are about the same quality as my Dell XPS 15 (2014 model), some of the Macbook Air style laptop's (https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/lafiteII/ a UK startup that my friend works in bought this for the 20 or so hires they got once they got out of the incubator they are pretty flawless) I've seen are almost indistinguishable from Apple (with the exception that they are usually not unibody) and if you stick an Acer logo in the front and call them the C97somthing I would not be able to tell that this wasn't a brand product.

Now don't get me wrong if you pay peanuts you'll get monkeys but if you are paying 500-600$ for an OEM laptop you will get good quality including IPS screens and capacitive trackpads with large enough orders (10-20+).

I wonder if MSFT would ever let OEM's lock the devices to their bloatware spec and if so how long until we get laws similar to SIM unlocks passed to give us customers some control back.

Not the sort of behavior I would classify as "trustworthy".