After almost two years of development, the operating system qubes 4.2.0 has been released. The new version of qubes implements the idea of using a hypervisor for strict isolation of applications and components of the OS. This means that each class of applications and system services work in separate virtual machines, providing enhanced security. The qubes 4.2.0 release was recently presented and can be accessed from the official qubes website.
To run the qubes operating system, it is recommended to have a system with at least 16 GB of RAM (though a minimum of 6 GB is accepted) and a 64-bit CPU with VT-X/AMD-V technology support. The presence of an Intel GPU is preferred, as NVIDIA and AMD GPUs have not been thoroughly tested with qubes. The installation image size is 6 GB and is available for download from the qubes mirrors.
The qubes operating system organizes applications into classes based on the importance of processed data and tasks to be solved. Each class of applications and system services operate in separate virtual machines using the Xen hypervisor. While these applications are accessible within one desktop, they are visually differentiated by different colors of the window frames. A special service is used to facilitate the interaction between applications.
The qubes operating system supports different templates for creating virtual environments, including Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Arch Linux. It also allows for the creation of virtual machines running Windows and Whonix for anonymous access via Tor. The user shell of qubes is based on XFCE, and each application launched from the menu starts in a specific virtual machine. The content of each virtual environment is determined by a set of templates.
The main changes in the qubes 4.2.0 release include:
- DOM0 base environment is updated to