Download Qubes OS 3.0

A few days ago, version 3.0 of Qubes OS was released. Qubes OS is a privacy and security oriented operating system that uses security by isolation, which means that the different parts of the OS run in separate VMs. In contrast to VMWare and Virtualbox, for example, there is no host OS, but the VMs run directly on the existing hardware. The virtualization is provided by bare metal hypervisor Xen and the user environment can be chosen from Fedora, Debian, Whonix and Windows, among others. More information about Qubes OS can be found on this page are being found. The most important improvements in version 3.0 are listed below for you.

New features since 2.0

• HAL (Hypervisor Abstraction Layer) – based on libvirt, opens a whole new possibilities of using different hypervisors. Currently Qubes OS uses Xen.
• Xen 4.4 – many new features, but for us the most important is much more mature libxl toolstack.
• Qrexec 3 – greatly improved performance by using direct VM-VM connections and bigger buffers.
• Debian templates gets official support.
• Whonix templates
• Build system improvements – especially support for distribution-specific plugins (makes supporting multiple distributions much easier) and building templates using DispVM.
• Automated tests – makes much easier to find bugs, before its even shipped to users

Known issues

• Windows Tools: qvm-block does not work
• UEFI is not supported, you need to enable “legacy boot” in BIOS before installing Qubes OS
• Some icons in the Qubes Manager application might not be drawn correctly when using the Xfce4 environment in Dom0. If this bothers you, please use the KDE environment instead.
• If your GPU is not correctly supported by the Dom0 kernel (eg the 3D desktop effects do not run smoothly) then you might experience “heaviness” with Windows 7-based AppVMs. In that case, please solve the problem with your GPU support in Dom0 in the first place (by using a different kernel), or install Qubes OS on a different system.
• For other known issues take a look at our tickets