Advantages:
- lower attack surface (a virtual floppy drive had a vulnerability)
- easier to parse output of
lsblkfor livecheck (testing whether all disks are set to read-only or not in Whonix Live Mode)
In VirtualBox:
lsblk --all
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 100G 1 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 100G 1 part /lib/live/mount/medium
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sr0 is the virtual DVD drive and considered read-write (i.e. not read-only [RO]).
Disadvantages, the following will have worse usability:
- Transfer files from the Host into Whonix-Gateway ™ or Whonix-Workstation ™ through ISO images
- Boot from virtual DVD (for purposes of system recovery, data recovery, malware analysis, partitioning, and whatnot).
Users need to manually add a DVD drive but this can be added to user documentation.