Introduction to Qubes OS when you do not know what it is

Solène Rapenne, who writes a lot about and contributes to operating systems like OpenBSD and Qubes OS, has published a primer about what, exactly, Qubes OS is.

I like to call Qubes OS a meta operating system, because it is not a Linux / BSD / Windows based OS: its core is Xen (some kind of virtualization enabled kernel). Not only it’s Xen based, but by design it is meant to run virtual machines, hence the name “meta operating system” which is an OS meant to run many OSes make sense to me.
↫ Solène Rapenne

Rapenne explains the various ways in which isolated virtual machines are used in Qubes OS, and it’s easy to see just how secure Qubes OS’ way of doing things is. At the same time, it seems quite cumbersome to me as a regular user, and I don’t think I’m up for dealing with all of that. If you do security research, handle private or classified data, are a whistleblower or an investigative journalist, thoug, Qubes seems like a natural choice.

Interesting to note is that Rapenne used to use OpenBSD for her security work, but moved to Qubes OS because its virtual machine infrastructure is far more robust, and hardware support is better, as well.