I did this with Qubes a year ago and haven’t had any issues apart from figuring out the right flags to get the full performance, otherwise the GPU would cap around 30% under load with low CPU load.
Kind of at the mercy of what your motherboard and bios will allow, mine I had to cheese a little and disable the PCI device on boot so I get to decrypt my disk with no screen lol but it works!
Not op but I do a lot of architecture and infrastructure work on top of my normal dev work so keeping everything separated and per-client has become a pretty important advantage for me personally
Fwiw I had to tinker a bit to get good video playback, Fedora was always choppy for me for some reason but debian is typically smooth with hw accel disabled.
As for the gaming, depending on your setup (I have a desktop and T480 I keep in sync) you can absolutely run two video cards and do PCI passthrough on one to a gaming VM. I have mine set up with a dedicated NIC and USB card and just use a KVM to swap between Qubes and Windows (for now) and it’s worked really well. Had to play around a ton to get the full speed out of the GPU though and it only seemed to work in windows so hopefully get that going for a Linux hvm one day.
Absolutely agree there is no going back, I have all of my work stuff entirely hardware agnostic and a full on replica of my work desktop ready to go in a moment should the desktop die. Apart from that keeping client work isolated has been such a game changer.
Fwiw I used to daily an x210 and then an x230 in IT and pretty frequently typed with one hand while carrying with another without the weight bugging me but your mileage may vary.
You can definitely send them flying and not damage them my coworker launched theirs across the office and the bezel just snapped back together.
I have a T480 now since I do more dev work and needed a slightly bigger keyboard/screen and it’s phenomenal with Qubes and 48gb of memory on the quad core i5. Love the ease to repair I just swapped a motherboard on it in around 30 minutes and was back up and running
This is pretty great advice to get into it. I previously ran 3 poweredge 2950s but have since switched to nothing self hosted and back to everything self hosted but on a much leaner setup with a NUC and 14tb WD my book drive with a dual Noctua 4020 fan shroud I 3d printed that it absolutely needed as I killed the original drive in two weeks.
My replica is just a 14tb in my desktop I run rsync to pull the data occasionally after checking SMART status on the primary. It’s not versioned or perfect but it works great to give me a chance to backup my jellyfin media. Everything I care about also gets backed up via restic.
Eventually plan to run a build with the Modcase MASS with multiple drives but for now this setup has been working fantastic.
I just use nextcloud as a target for backups (Aegis, Signal, QkSMS). Apps such as KeePassDX I have load the file via nextcloud. My contacts and calendar go through it as well, photos are just set to auto upload along with a few other directories.
As for the home screen layouts, I just take screenshots once I have it how I like and try to remember to take them again if I change stuff.
It’s not a full backup but I’m back up and running fairly quickly (Pixel 5A died on me 3 times in under a one year lifespan per device).
Be careful depending on the model, some of those run hot. I managed to kill one in under 2 weeks just by copying a large amount of data to it and had to print a fan shroud for it’s replacement to keep the temps at a reasonable level.
I would never go back from qubes. VirtualGL seems promising for the hardware accelerated apps and GPU passthrough for a gaming VM is insane
Heavily agree, a lot of content had issues playing for me with swiftfin. No issues at all with Infuse other than the fact that intro skipper doesn’t work with it
I’ve got 3 Wyze cam v3s running the wyze mini hacks firmware sectioned off in a VLAN that can only reach Frigate (no internet).
I have frigate running on a cheap Lenovo M900 I got on ebay for $65 that has an i7 and 8gb of memory and it actually does fairly well without the Google coral USB TPU as long as that was the only service on that system. Trying to run Frigate on my NUC with other services without a TPU caused some issues with CPU usage but with a TPU I would bet it’ll all run on the one system.
Home assistant works exceptionally well for notifying, one of my cameras I have on UDP since the signal isn’t great and get a couple artifacts that trip it up but other than that it has been much quicker to notify and more reliable than anything in the consumer market I’ve tried so far.
I started with openscad and moved to freecad. Freecad is powerful but definitely not perfect but it has suited my needs fairly well.
I’m still a holdout for superslicer but I did migrate my profiles to PrusaSlicer for those sweet organic supports.
Using sonixd for desktop and finamp for mobile through my Jellyfin server and really liking it.
I did have to make a separate Jellyfin account for my music since I didn’t want music showing up on the Jellyfin TV apps cluttering it up but not bad overall!
Finamp doesn’t track new items in a playlist marked for offline play which is my main gripe atm.
When was the last time you ran a distro and how awful was the hardware to have this experience? In the past 10 years all of them have been fairly “hit the ground running” for me unless it had something weird like Nvidia Optimus
Doesn’t mean much with how bad the QA and overall lifespan of Pixel devices have been unfortunately. Hopefully better this time but hard to want to put money in when the previous generations all had such issues and bad QC.
Extending warranty for the 5As then handing out equally defective devices is a pain. I’m on my 3rd one and I’m really not planning on it surviving over a year since none of the others did and when they died I was sitting down using the phone.
Only thing keeping me on them is GrapheneOS, too difficult to go back after getting a taste of it lol
While not something I would ever use, I can definitely see the use. It does look nice but as someone who has experienced Microsoft from the start it’s gonna be a no for me.
I literally bought the wrong version of a game called Heretic on Amazon in the early 2000s because it “had a cool penguin on it” lmao
I love grapheneOS but holy hell the pixels suck now. Two 5as and a 7 both with random screen issues. The first 5As screen died while sitting on my desk, you could unlock it with fingerprint and hear audio but just black screen. Ubreakifix fried the board during repair lmao
My brother needed the driver installed in debian on Qubes but has been flawless beyond that. When I was still running arch it just worked out of the box