LinusSecurityTips

@slicknux Yup, there is simply no such thing as THE secure OS. But if we were to compare different OS, Qubes would be on top of that list.

How is logging every keystroke you type and then sending it back to Microsoft going "to protect you"?

Windows 10 is not the *most* secure OS, a simple virus would take over your whole system (unlike Qubes). Ignoring the fact that Windows 10 has by default a rootkit that logs all of your keystrokes and sends them to Microsoft, great security huh?

I just found about it and thought you may be interested: https://tux.io

Lol I asked "what do you think is the *most* secure OS?" and not "what do you think is *THE* secure OS?"

It's no longer KDE, they're using xfce now (in Qubes 3.2). That could change maybe in Qubes 4.x though.

Here's what the FAQ says: > If you really want to call it a distribution, then it’s more of a “Xen distribution” than a Linux one. But Qubes is much more than just Xen packaging. It has its own VM management infrastructure, with support for template VMs, centralized VM updating, etc. It also has a very unique GUI virtualization infrastructure. Xen is not like VirtualBox (which runs on a kernel, it's called a type II hypervisor), Xen is a bare metal type 1 hypervisor, again from the link I mentioned earlier by Qubes founder: > First, products such as VMWare Workstation or Fusion, or Virtual Box, are all examples of type II hypervisors (sometimes called “hosted VMMs”), which means that they run inside a normal OS, such as Windows, as ordinary processes and/or kernel modules. This means that they use the OS-provided services for all sorts of things, from networking, USB stacks, to graphics output and keyboard and mouse input, which in turn implies they can be only as secure as the hosting OS is. If the hosting OS got compromised, perhaps via a bug in its DHCP client, or USB driver, then it is a game over, also for all your VMs. Xen is absolutely not like those, but I do understand from where your misunderstanding came from (maybe treating Xen as a similar VirtualBox?). It's based on Xen (but it uses Linux (fedora) in dom0).

Yes, she makes the distinction between "monolithic kernels" such as Linux and then goes on to say that Xen is only a few hundred thousands of lines of code and doesn't have many APIs (hence microkernel, if you don't what that means: "microkernel (also known as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC)."). And so yes the Xen hypervisor can be called a microkernel.

Where did I suggest that dom0 (which is not what Qubes' VMs are based on) was not based on Linux?

Can you quote where she says that Xen is not a microkernel?

My error, wanted to mention the qubes-builder that compiles and creates the Qubes ISO https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-builder

No, you claimed that Xen runs on top of a Linus microkernel (Here's what you said: "Qubes OS runs Xen on a Linux kernel.") You already agreed that Xen is based on a microkernel design, are you now going to claim that Linux is a microkernel?

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-builder-github https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=org%3AQubesOS+xen&type= But you said that Xen runs on a microkernel, and that for Qubes it runs on Linux, which is nonsense since Linux is a monolithic kernel and not a microkernel.

By your own logic the Linux kernel is a microkernel (as the Wikipedia page says "Xen ... is a hypervisor using a microkernel design") but it's not! Linux is a monolithic kernel, and not a microkernel. It's mind blowing that you can't understand this simple fact.