A secure computer OS

Software
1

I want to commit a few war crimes on a system and need the OS to be hard. Qubes is something I tried out but doesn’t work on most of my hardware because low power hardware and the one it does work on which has good hardware loses all files in my efi partition after a few reboots so I’m guessing my hardware just isn’t good for it. Tried 3.2 and that worked without ever breaking but that’s legacy. I also tried the latest release candidates on 4.0 but same issues as stable 4.0.

I want qubes but without the brokeness. Any suggestions?

edit: At the moment, I am looking at using hardened gentoo for these purposes and just running up several whonix boxes with KVM and disconnecting gentoo box while arch is running. Good idea or is gentoo not good enough? Gentoo will also have only free licensed software running and no web browser or anything like that on main. Basically the main gentoo area I will treat as a dom0.

2

Best to ask on the Qubes forum what models they recommend for version 4.0 which are in your budget. Based on your previous posts, I’m guessing that the L14 is too expensive for you and you don’t want a Librem Mini v2.

I’m a big fan of buying used Thinkpads, since they cost the same as new consumer-grade laptops, but last longer for me, since they are fixable. I’ve never bothered with Qubes, so I can’t really make any recommendations, but it does like a lot of cores and lots of memory, so the trick is to find a used laptop with a recent CPU that has 4 or 6 cores.

3

I’m not buying a new computer just for this OS. My machine that I used 3.2 with no problem has 32 GB ram, tpm and 6 cores. I have libre thinkpads but they can’t handle this OS with only 8GB of ram. Please do not suggest ways of having qubes work for me because it just doesn’t work. Do you have suggestions for other operating systems?

4

I am stealing your war crimes bit. That is a glorious way to describe what you want to do.

1 Like
5

It may (or may not) be Grace Hopper who said: “The only secure system is a chalkboard in a locked room.”

6

Usual suspects: Kodachi, Tails, Whonix… Or get something more special: OpenBSD, Subgraph, Tin Hat,… Others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-focused_operating_system And I agree with Admiral Hopper - secure depends on you expected opposition and vectors, not so much how much war craft you expect to play.

7

Is sub graph still a thing?

8

They have a site but the wiki for their last stable release isn’t looking good.