For some time, I have been following the development of Qubes OS a totally different operating system than we know, developed for security purposes.
Qubes OS is one operating system which allows you to create different virtual domains to do different tasks.
So you can go from one domain to another, depending on the task you want to do, and you can install a completely different operating system.
Qubes OS is based on Fedora and a main idea that is summarized in the following words: "security in isolation."
Using the domains we mentioned above as light Xen virtual machines it tries to combine two conflicting goals:
How to make isolation between domains as strong as possible, and how to make this isolation as simple and easy as possible.
Although you could certainly use any of the applications virtual machines out there to run as many VMs as you want on your favorite Linux distribution, the result won't be the same, especially if you don't want multiple desktop environments running in their own windows. You will be presented with a lot of errors and problems that you will have to solve.
For example, how do you share files or copy and paste them safely between VMs? How do you keep all of these VMs up to date with the latest security updates?
In a traditional Linux distribution you have to do this manually on each of the VMs you have installed. Qubes provides a number of additional tools that make it easy to manage a desktop that is full of different virtual machines and run with different levels of trust (trusted - untrusted).
The distribution uses Xen to provide more security. Instead of each VM having its own complete interface, Qubes uses the more privileged dom0 Xen VM as a host for a desktop with environment (Qubes currently has KDE or XFCE, although the community offers other DEs).
Thus, VM displays the windows of each individual application within the dom0 desktop environment.
So running Firefox on Qubes is just like you would expect in any other distribution. The main difference, however, is that Qubes allows you to give your VM the confidence level you want, from red (unreliable) to black (reliable) with different rainbow colors.
If you are interested below you will find the distribution link download in the latest version (RC).
Not recommended for beginners.
Qubes OS Release 4.0-rc3 (Release Candidate)
- Qubes-R4.0-rc3-x86_64.iso
- Qubes-R4.0-rc3-x86_64.iso.DIGESTS
- Qubes-R4.0-rc3-x86_64.iso.asc
- Qubes-R4.0-rc3-x86_64.torrent
