I understand that Whonix has jumped to LXQT to get onto Wayland. I won’t debate that.
Meanwhile, Qubes remains an Xfce environment.
What I want to know is, what’s the best approach for users to keep Whonix and Qubes aligned? My main issue is that I’ve written a lot of scripts that assume Whonix is running Xfce. So either I have to rewrite them (not impossible), or bring Whonix back to Xfce. I’m also uncertain because Xfce has announced it’s adding Wayland support, and has already released a preview version of its own compositor. So I don’t know where we’ll be in a year. I certainly don’t want to rewrite it twice.
Install desired Xfce apps (xfce4-terminal and thunar, etc.) into Whonix. Seems like the easiest option, but then my Whonix will have more bloat.
Remove LXQT components and install Xfce apps (not the windowing environment). That will reduce the bloat, but which LXQT components should/can be removed?
Do neither, because Whonix now relies on some LXQT feature that can’t be replaced or ripped out?
I don’t want to blunder here. So I would appreciate some advice.
If I am not mistaken, that announcement even existed before Non-Qubes-Whonix port to Wayland started. So Xfce seems to be a bit on the slower development side when it comes to Wayland.
So I might reasonably speculate, that by the time Xfce with Wayland support enters the next stable Debian version, Xfce will have “essential” support of Wayland only. Roughly equivalent to where LXQt in Debian stable is at the time of writing.
What I can tell you is that “Xfce now has Wayland support. Therefore let’s port back to Xfce for the sake of that is what we used before.” isn’t in my mind and would not be a convincing argument by itself.
There are no API stability guarantees.
But at the moment, porting back to Xfce doesn’t seem likely.
Porting to yet another desktop environment also doesn’t seem likely. It hasn’t been suggested yet. That dekstop envrionment would need to be significantly better regarding Wayland support and other requirement as in low resources use because it runs inside VMs, security, etc. (These requirements have been discussed for various existing desktop environments.)
Hi, thanks for the info. Yeah I don’t expect you to change course, but I wonder what Qubes will do. Previously we had a uniform Xfce experience, and now it’s split. So I’m wrapping my head around that.
Right now I’m exploring LXQT to see how I feel about it. It makes sense to try to adapt to it rather than fight it. So I’m going to give it a chance.
Putting aside aesthetic differences, some config issues, something that stood out as an issue for me with QTerminal is the popup warning about pasted text. In xfce4-terminal, the window was large. But the one for QTerminal is very small. The biggest problem is that I can’t resize the window. Neither my window resize shortcuts (that work for everything else), nor using the mouse to tug on the corner of the window seems to do anything. And the window is so small, it’s not clear what is being pasted. So it feels like a step down.
Another notable issue is that when I select “view in disposible” in PCmanFM (file manager), I get unusual behavior. Instead of simply opening up in a disposible qube, I’m prompted if I want to move the file to some other qube, which can’t possibly be the disp qube since it doesn’t exist yet AND the file isn’t auto sent to the existing dips qube that was supposed to make all our lives so easy.
Obviously this is a Qubes-related issue. But it’s another roadblock that will have to be attended to for me to get back my Whonix experience.
Having said that, I intend to try to figure out these things on my own, and to supply my own configuration first before trying to replace anything with Xfce. I accept that it will take some time and effort.
I’ll come back in a week if there’s outstanding issues, with my fixes. If it’s ready, I’ll post my Whonix+Qubes configuration scripts.
This isn’t due to PCManFM-Qt, the same behavior occurs if you run qvm-open-in-dvm ./file in a terminal. The reason for this is because Whonix-Workstation qubes have two hardening measures enabled on the dom0 side:
Any attempt to open a file in another qube must present a confirmation prompt, and
Files, URIs, and programs may only be launched in other Whonix-Workstation qubes.
This prevents a malicious application from opening something like https : / / attack.nowiknowyourip.net (example URL, not known to be functional) in a disposable qube that has clearnet access. If that were possible, it could be used to deanonymize you.
When the prompt appears, the default selected item should be “Disposable VM (whonix-workstation-18-dvm)”. Clicking “OK” in the popup should open a new DispVM, and display the file in it.