Half of these exist because I was bored once.
The Windows 10 and MacOS ones are GPU passthrough enabled and what I occasionally use if I have to use a Windows or Mac application. Windows 7 is also GPU enabled, but is more a nostalgia thing than anything.
I think my PopOS VM was originally installed for fun, but I used it along with my Arch Linux, Debian 12 and Testing (I run Testing on host, but I wanted a fresh environment and was too lazy to spin up a Docker or chroot), Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora to test various software builds and bugs, as I don't like touching normal Ubuntu unless I must.
The Windows Server 2022 one is one I recently spun up to mess with Windows Docker Containers (I have to port an app to Windows, and was looking at that for CI). That all become moot when I found out Github's CI doesn't support Windows Docker containers despite supporting Windows runners (The organization I'm doing it for uses Github, so I have to use it).
I have about twice this many VMs and about this many running at any given time.
I use Qubes btw
Its my only computer. I couldn't go back to anything else. Every time I double click Firefox, it opens a new VM. When I close Firefox, the VM is destroyed.
Email is in a separate VM. Email attachments also open in a disposable VM. USB devices are quarantined unless I connect them to a specific VM. Its a game changer.
Cons: I need as much ram as I used to need when I ran Windows. Watching videos is a bit choppy at full screen sometimes. And I can't play any video games.
Sounds like some pretty serious cons
Out of curiosity why do you like qubes? Having everything in a VM doesn't sound that great to me
I get that the main concern of it is security but what do you do that it demands that level of hardening? I've only ever got one virus in my life that I know of as it is and that was on windows
Not op but I do a lot of architecture and infrastructure work on top of my normal dev work so keeping everything separated and per-client has become a pretty important advantage for me personally
Yep that I imagine is one of the main intended use cases, in my case would probably be overkill though
Yeah I also consult with many different clients. Sometimes those clients need me to install sketch software. Thank god I can do this in a silo in Qubes, or it could endanger my other clients.
Lol wut? Those pros far outweigh the cons. But I guess I don't care about video games?
I have money on my computer, and I have a company that has customer info. That's enough of a reason for me to want to protect my shit better than running one big, super-vulnerable system
Fwiw I had to tinker a bit to get good video playback, Fedora was always choppy for me for some reason but debian is typically smooth with hw accel disabled.
As for the gaming, depending on your setup (I have a desktop and T480 I keep in sync) you can absolutely run two video cards and do PCI passthrough on one to a gaming VM. I have mine set up with a dedicated NIC and USB card and just use a KVM to swap between Qubes and Windows (for now) and it's worked really well. Had to play around a ton to get the full speed out of the GPU though and it only seemed to work in windows so hopefully get that going for a Linux hvm one day.
Absolutely agree there is no going back, I have all of my work stuff entirely hardware agnostic and a full on replica of my work desktop ready to go in a moment should the desktop die. Apart from that keeping client work isolated has been such a game changer.
I use Debian. Like I said, video is only sometimes choppy. I usually have a few vlc windows open at one time. Something I've learned is that it will use a lot of CPU even if the video is paused. To stop it, I have to manually set the video source to "none" when I pause a video and leave it in the BG.
Or just pause the whole VM. Another great Qubes feature
You can say: "I use Arch, Fedora, Windows, MacOS, Gentoo, LFS, Debian, PopOS, and more, btw."
It's a terabyte SSD. I've currently got 136 GB left on it. I think part of it might be they're auto-expanding qcow2 images, so they don't actually take up the full space provisioned for them.
I've had physical esx servers running this many VMS simultaneously, and I can totally see why a hobbiest or dev would have a need for this many VMs on standby. You are sane, yes
On the joke, define "sane". 😬
On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than "I was bored". In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can't normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can't/don't want to use my phone.
I think this VM is still on Sonoma, actually. I still need to upgrade.
I can't remember exactly what I did to get an installer image, but there's a million shell scripts online for downloading macOS installer images. For booting it, I use this premade OpenCore for KVM/Proxmox. I have to check if I made other modifications (I run on an AMD CPU), but I think I mainly just had to set the serial and model - I personally used a 2019 Mac Pro.
Yes, I downloaded it, but just couldn't figure out how to turn it into a bootable installer ISO without an already working macos instance
I could be totally delusional, but I think it's just something like
dd if=whatchamacallit.dmg of=whatchamacallit.img. I think you can get a net install image through macrecovery, which is a utility included with OpenCore packages.
Bahah i have like 7 but im concerned by the fact i probably forgot the password to half of em xD
GPU passthrough has always been one of those exciting ideas I’d love to dive into one day. My current GPU being a little older, has only 4GB of RAM. Oh the joy's of being a budget PC user. Thankfully it's more of a "would be nice rather" than an "actually need"....
I did this with Qubes a year ago and haven't had any issues apart from figuring out the right flags to get the full performance, otherwise the GPU would cap around 30% under load with low CPU load.
Kind of at the mercy of what your motherboard and bios will allow, mine I had to cheese a little and disable the PCI device on boot so I get to decrypt my disk with no screen lol but it works!
My motherboard is a stock dell from around 2012 so I doubt performance would be at all good. Thats even if it worked in the first place....
