On a related note re: development effort/time and outcomes, HulaHoop maintaining KVM as opposed to being dedicated to VirtualBox seems to be not ideal (yes I know KVM is his pet project, but still).
How many really use KVM vs VBox for Whonix? Probably 1:50 (at best). KVM would better off being deprecated like VMWare and efforts dedicated to where the community numbers are.
+1
good enough > ideal
Will you be releasing updated snapshots of Stretch based Whonix over time? Kinda like how Debian works with their stable point releases?
The urgency for KVM has increased with the ever stringent hardware requirements for Qubes 4.0. The libre community needs a solution that can work on any hardware out there while not being the neutered, insecure and underperforming option that VBox is.
How big is my userbase? It will be difficult to tell since the technically adept will never be filing bug reports or forum topics. It would be an interesting feature of the Whonix stats daemon if it can be safely done.
I’m using VBox myself, but looking into switching, mainly because I notice I better use different Workstations for different situations, I understand Qubes will be very helpful in that.
From what I read in Qubes’ site, many of the benefits are granted with any kind of (modern) hardware. If I improve my situation over VBox anyway, what reason is there to choose KVM?
Qubes 3.2 will be EOL in 6 months since is released. Qubes will require you to buy a laptop 1000+ dollar laptop with specific features in order to be able to run it. Xen is also supper finnicky about hardware suppprt as it does not harness Linux driver support. The efficacy of x86 hardware in being able to stop advanced adversaries is seriously questionable in light of hardware bugs making headlines daily.
It makes no difference to me whether you use KVM or not. I’m not selling you anything. Up to you to decide and do your homework.
I was not aware of that, will they stop support for versions that don’t require this kind of hardware? if so shouldn’t they expect a sharp drop in their user base?
That’s not true, you can run it on a way cheaper laptop and there are plenty in the HCL.
While our standard policy is to support each Qubes release for six months after the next major or minor release, the special extension for 3.2.1 raises this period to one full year. Therefore, the stable release of Qubes 4.0 sets the EOL (end-of-life) date for Qubes 3.2.1 at one year from today on 2019-03-28. We expect 3.2.1 to be available soon, after Kernel 4.9 testing is completed.
I don’t think that they are going to loose a lot of people, because it’s already a small niche of people that use Qubes, most would probably upgrade/buy a new laptop to run the latest and greatest Qubes (at least that’s what i did).
If you subtract the number of PCs that lack IOMMU and the ones that do but are discontinued (assuming you are not buying used) and look at models that don’t lack critical things like audio/wifi support - the list is small and is almost exclusively i7 high end Intel.