A little while ago I upgraded my desktop and I now have an 8-core Ryzen 7 1700 (that's 16 threads!) and 32 GB of RAM. I installed Kubuntu on it after the first few results on Google suggested Ubuntu would let me install and use the proprietary drivers for the graphics card that I bought; a GeForce 1060 GTX with 6GB VRAM.
Ubuntu is one of my least favorite distros but the promise of easy setup of Nvidia drivers combined with knowing that a lot of third-parties have Ubuntu quite high up on the list of distros they try and support with their software made me pick Ubuntu (well Kubuntu but it's almost the same except at least I get a Desktop that I think is nice).
Kubuntu works pretty well. Not perfectly but tbh nothing ever really does. One thing that I find particularly annoying though is that the computer freezes on boot when I enter the Full-Disk Encryption key unless I boot it in recovery mode. It became this way after I installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers and because the regular boot FDE key input is graphical whereas the recovery mode boot is text only at the FDE key input stage I think it is related to the Nvidia driver. So not even the thing that primarily made me choose Ubuntu works quite as well as I'd hoped. There is one graphical glitch that occurs while I'm on my desktop also but anyway like I said there will always be some problems, and I won't go into too much detail. Primarily I just wanted to point out that things aren't perfect currently so Qubes OS need not be perfect either.
Probably a lot of people on HN have work stations that are even nicer than this but for me this is such a monumental step up from the computers I have used to have that it feels like I am sitting in front of a TOP500 Supercomputer that somehow everyone else that had access forgot about and so I am left with being able to use it all by myself :P
Here are some of the things that my computer can do and that I enjoy being able to do;
- Run the most recent stable release of Blender (they add awesome new features every now and then that are really useful) - Play video games from Steam and capture my desktop with OBS Studio while doing so. - Use Spotify. - Use Firefox.
Bunch of other things as well.
Anyhow, I was wondering, can I easily install and use the proprietary Nvidia drivers with Qubes OS? Can I play video games from Steam, make use of the CUDA cores for Blender etc, record my desktop with OBS Studio,
Because if so then sign me the heck up :) I would love to run the web browser in isolation for example. Perhaps even have different "cubes" like for example have the web browser that I log into my online bank be separate from everything else, have the browser where I log into YouTube be separate so I can be signed into Google while not being tracked as much across other sites at the same time, separate cube for Reddit, separate cube for HN. Not too many separate cubes but something like that. Speaking of which did anyone set up firewall rules for this kind of separation so that you don't accidentally visit sites outside of YouTube in the YouTube-dedicated browser etc?
But yeah first and foremost I would like to know about Blender and Spotify and Steam and OBS Studio with Qubes OS. Also, full disk encryption and LVM volume groups. How about ZFS? And what kind of guests can run? Can I run FreeBSD guests? I have a lot more questions too I think but I can't think of them all right now and besides too many questions lead to none or just a few getting answered anyway.