Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system
Reviewed by Marcus Holmberg
Qubes OS
qubes-os.org 2 ratings so far*
Rate Qubes OS: No account needed
Threat level
Targeted
A targeted-tier tool. Built for a real, capable adversary. Overkill for everyone below. Threat levels
Our take
Qubes takes security through compartmentalization to its logical end, running your activities in separate isolated VMs so a breach in one cannot reach the others. That is genuinely strong, and genuinely demanding: it needs capable hardware, a real learning curve, and patience, which is why it is squarely for experts. If you are a high-risk user willing to invest the effort, little is more rigorous; everyone else will find it more friction than their threat model needs.
GitHub at a glance
QubesOS/qubes-core-admin
Stars
141
-1 this week
Last commit
13d ago
healthy
License
LGPL-2.1
Stars, last 30d
Website at a glance
qubes-os.org
C score 50
Basic website security headers
Graded by Mozilla HTTP Observatory, tested 13d ago
Inspect this site yourself
Measures the security configuration of the tool's own website, not the privacy of the product itself. A strong tool can still score low here.
Qubes OS alternatives
Fedora Workstation Fedora Workstation: User friendly and easy to setup
Ubuntu Ubuntu: User friendly and easy to setup
macOS Apple's desktop OS. A real privacy step up from Windows, but closed and US-based.
secureblue secureblue is a security-hardened immutable Linux OS built on Fedora Atomic Desktops. It ships as OCI bootable container images and applies kernel hardening, a hardened memory allocator from GrapheneOS, and a hardened Chromium browser called Trivalent.
Kicksecure Kicksecure is a security-hardened Debian-based Linux distribution that applies a broad set of kernel and userspace hardening settings out of the box, reducing the attack surface without requiring manual configuration. It also serves as the foundation for the Whonix anonymity OS.
Fedora Atomic Desktops Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, and others) are immutable Fedora variants where the base OS is read-only and updated atomically via rpm-ostree. Applications run as Flatpaks, and rollback to a prior OS image is built in.
Qubes OS license, in plain English
LGPL-2.1 Weak copyleft
Closed-source software is allowed to link to this library, but changes to the library itself must be shared under the same license.
Permits
- Commercial use
- Modification
- Distribution
- Private use
Requires
- Disclose source
- Same license (library)
- State changes
- License and copyright notice
Does not provide
- Liability cover
- Warranty
Why it matters: Weak copyleft protects the project's own files: improvements to them stay open, while the code can still sit alongside closed-source software.
Plain-language summary of the project's license, not legal advice. Read the full text for the exact terms.
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