QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

this is my next OS to experiment with. However i'm worried my toy laptop with 16gb of ram (thinkpad t480) wont cut it.

Anyone want to chime in here?

16GB of RAM is adequate for Qubes, in practice you end up running a handful of Xen VMs, with most of the VMs (vault, disposable,...) using little RAM.

The system requirements are specified as:

minimum 6GB RAM; 16GB recommended

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/

Last time I tried to throw it on an old box it couldn't handle it due to the lack of IOMMU. Granted this was like... 5 or so years ago? I think my newer laptop could probably handle it, so maybe it would be worth giving another shot.

I've used this as my daily driver before when my workflow needed more crossplatform operability between windows and different varieties of linux. This was a long while ago on some old 2013 laptop with 16 gigs of ram and it worked fine.

The real thing you gotta watch out for is full compatibility with all the virtualization extensions it needs in the processor. Key in that old laptop working was that it was an i7.

I used it productively (see my other comment) a couple of years a ago on an average Dell Inspiron. It worked pretty well, no complaints.

It's fine for light to moderate use, just don't expect to run a ton of AppVMs at once.

I've got an X250 (2C/4T) 16GB gutless wonder as my Qubes laptop, and it's fine. Qubes has memory balancing/clawback from VMs, so you can in practice have more AppVMs open than you'd expect - they'll be using less RAM, but it works.

If you're on a short-RAM laptop, though, definitely reduce Dom0's memory allocation. It defaults to 4GB, and you're perfectly fine with 2GB or perhaps even 1GB - there's not much going on in it, and that RAM is better used for AppVMs.

If you're short on cores, you might also look at the "sched-gran=core" flag to Xen. This allows hyperthreading, but ensures that hyperthreads are only ever scheduled in the same VM (and as the threat model assumes "anything in a VM can read anything else in a VM," a hyperthread-based leak doesn't gain an attacker any access you wouldn't otherwise have). The performance gains on a laptop can be noticeable.

Don't expect great battery life, though. Xen's power management is "present and accounted for," at best. There's also an incantation to disable turbo that helps a lot when mobile.

Runs fine on my framework laptop with 16gb of ram.

There are ways to get it running without an IOMMU, mostly involving making your NetVM and such paravirtualized. You just lose basically all of the hardware isolation benefits there. But for playing around, especially on a trusted LAN, you should be able to get it working. If you can't figure it out, jump on the IRC channel - there are a few people in there pretty good at weird hardware hacking for Qubes.

I've been daily driving it on my Thinkpad T580 with 16gb of ram for the past two years. I really enjoy it. Very occasionally it tells me that it's running out of RAM, but when that happens it's usually because I forgot to shutdown some VMs. Besides for that everything works great. I'd recommend using an SSD though with at least 512GB of storage, but better with 1TB.