Privacy benefits aside, does qubes run better than a typical vm like virtualbox? I tend to fiddle with distros a lot and I feel qubes might be a good choice, though I’m wondering about how efficient it is
Privacy benefits aside, does qubes run better than a typical vm like virtualbox? I tend to fiddle with distros a lot and I feel qubes might be a good choice, though I’m wondering about how efficient it is
What is a “typical VM”?
Qubes uses the type-1 Xen hypervisor that runs at a similar privilege to the kernel of other OSes. KVM is a type-1 hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor that runs in userspace. Of these three, Xen is the most performant hypervisor because virtualization is all it does.
If by “typical VM” you mean a guest OS running inside a window of the host OS, then Qubes will always come out on top because the graphics pipeline is much less of a bottleneck.
What tells them apart them? When would you use one vs the other?
Perhaps Xen for having all machines, including the one that controls the hypervisor, being virtualized, as opposed to KVM/QEMU running on the control bare-metal with VMs on top?
Basically, yes. Xen is a bespoke hypervisor. All it does, and all it can do, is run VMs. There is no host OS – management is done through a privileged VM called dom0. KVM is a part of the Linux kernel. Virtualization is only one of its features. VMs run alongside, and are managed by, the host OS.