Privacy benefits aside, does qubes run better than a typical vm like virtualbox? I tend to fiddle with distros a lot and I feel qubes might be a good choice, though I’m wondering about how efficient it is
It’s faster than virtualbox because there is lower recourse use from the base system and it uses qemu. Qemu/kvm is the fastest option for vms on Linux, but it isn’t exklusiv to qubes, you can also use it via the terminal on any distro or with a GUI like gnome boxes
Is there any info about how much the base system uses?
Not that I know, but you could spin up two VMs on your current system, one with Qubes and one with base fedora and compare the performance of vm’s
yeah i was just wondering if there was a quick chart somewhere so i could be lazy
KVM and virt-manager are faster than VirtualBox.
QubesOS uses a dedicated Hypervisor, Xen, which has this as its only job so I assume it is secure.
What is a “typical VM”?
Qubes uses the type-1 Xen hypervisor that runs at a similar privilege to the kernel of other OSes. KVM is a type-1 hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor that runs in userspace. Of these three, Xen is the most performant hypervisor because virtualization is all it does.
If by “typical VM” you mean a guest OS running inside a window of the host OS, then Qubes will always come out on top because the graphics pipeline is much less of a bottleneck.
