hey, not working for me please someone help
Just to chime in:
I had the same problem:
- Librem 15 Version 3, delivered with USB Qubes-R3.2-x86_64.
- After installing qubes the machine gets stuck in boot process with the message: Booting from Hard Disk
SOLUTION:
- I downloaded Qubes-R4.0-x86_64.iso from the qubes website,
- made a bootable USB (the instructions are given on the qubes website: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/installation-guide/
- and installed this new qubes version on my librem.
Now it boots. If everything works as expected in qubes I still have to find out.
SUGGESTION TO THE PURISM TEAM:
- Since the librem community is highly focused on security and privacy they are well aware of the fact that qubes is probably one of the os that optimally hits the tradeoff-sweetspot between sec&priv and user friendliness. Therefore, many will want to use it, possibly including Whonix.
- Delivering a qubes version that is known not to work with librem laptops - or at least not without jumping through major hoops (changing coreboot options, etc. by using terminal in the qubes installer - see the earlier comments of users) is not helpful.
- I would suggest 3 alternative solutions: 1) Exchange the qubes R3 version on USB sticks for R4 OR 2) put a notification on the purism Q&A website about this problem OR 3) make this information at least more easily findable in the forum. This page is well hidden in the purism forum. It took many search queries on the forum site to get to this page - naturally, no way of finding it through conventional search engines e.g. DuckDuck, searx.
I have also written an e-mail with those suggestions to the purism team.
FYI:
I am not a Linux geek. I would consider myself a normal computer user but with fair knowledge about privacy and security. I just know the very basics in Linux and I am happy if I achieve to use basic commands in the terminal. So maybe exactly the kind of customer Purism would like to address (high privacy concerns/medium computer skills) �
E.g. I would have had quite some hesitations to get qubes R3 running by following the comments by other users, because I would have feared to completely mess up my machine.
I agree that this info should be more easily viewable from the ordering page, but here is a post which explains why itâs currently 3.2 and not 4.0.
https://puri.sm/posts/qubes4-fully-working-on-librem-laptops/
TLDR: 3.2 used to work, 4.0 was/is being tested for compatibility.
But if 3.2 isnât working now, it seems like they should make the switch to 4.0 pretty soon.
Thanks for the valuable link! I probably was one of the last customers to receive a USB with qubes R3 because now I understand you are shipping it with R4.
I understand that things in terms of up-to-date versions/compatibility issues change very quickly in the computer industry meaning that it is almost impossible to be constantly ahead of the game. Great job guys!
BTW: Purism support rocks! This really sets purism apart from todayâs anonymous corporate world!
Could I kindly ask for anyone to lend me a hand installing the Qubes 4.0 on my librem 13, V2? I looked on the Qubes site but I donât see any .deb file anywhere. As it may of course be totally obvious to you, I am new to Linux, so please have pity.
First of all, a lot of people new to linux get frustrated quickly when itâs not exactly what theyâre used to with windows, so thank you for asking politely 
You wonât find a Qubes .deb package. Qubes is a totally different âdistributionâ from PureOS. In windows there are only a few âdistributionsâ, like windows 8, windows 10, windows mobile, etcâŚ
Since linux is open-source, there are thousands of distributions, and any teenager could make a new one in their basement over the weekend. They all share the linux kernel - the fundamental âcoreâ of linux - but different distributions can be wildly different.
Since Qubes is a different distribution, you will need to get the Qubes .iso file and burn it to a USB stick. Then, boot from the USB stick, and install Qubes as your new OS.
.deb files are software packages that you can only install on distros that use the debian package management system. Ubuntu, PureOS and Linux Mint are examples of linux distros that would accept .deb files.
.iso files are full disk images, that you have to copy to a USB drive or DVD, and then you can tell your computer to boot off the disk image
You canât just drag and drop the Qubes .iso file to the usb stick though. You will need to use a program, like unetbootin, to make the usb stick bootable.
P.S. Since Qubes is based on Red Hat, their package files will end in .rpm
P.P.S I havenât used Qubes or the Librem yet myself (in the mail yay) so I canât help too much with specifics
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Adding to what @gnulligan said:
It may help to understand the basic priciple of Qubes and its purpose before you start playing around with it, as it is a bit more complicated than your average OS.
Qubes main architecture is based on a hypervisor (Xen), which works like a backbone from which the ârealâ OS are run as virtual machines. You can have several OS templates in Qubes. It is shipped with Fedora (Red Hat) and Whonix (Debian). So strictly speaking there are no software packages for Qubes itself, only for the respective OS templates you decide to have it run. It is theoretically possible to even run a Windows template in Qubes (and it has been explored in Qubes 3.2), but that is very difficult to set up.
Qubes can do a lot for you in terms of security and it runs quite fine on a Librem I must say, but changing to Qubes from Windows is taking a significantly larger step than changing to, say, PureOS. On the bright side that means you will definitely be forced to understand a lot about how Linux works if you decide to give it a serious try. 
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We didnât ship QubesOS 4.0 (on USB drives) until it was officially released.
Solution is to download QubesOS 4 from their website, burn it to the USB drive and reinstall.
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It is shipped with Fedora (Red Hat) and Whonix (Debian).
I havenât used Qubes yet personally, but isnât the base install just Fedora (for the GUI etc) + Xen? AFAIK Whonix is just one of the possible guests for Xen, but is not a necessary component of Qubes. If they include Whonix now by default, that just means itâs a built-in client, but it could still be uninstalled if you wanted and youâd still have the full Qubes OS.
Fedora, meanwhile, is necessary for hardware support, GUI, etcâŚ
Correct me if Iâm wrong though
Itâs true that Fedora is the base for dom0, as you describe it. Afaik developers are still working on splitting dom0 into separate GUI and admin domains and then supposedly also switching the base OS used for these to something more minimal.
Thing is you do not install software packages in dom0 (if youâre a ânormalâ user at least), since it is only supposed to be coordinating and administrating the VMs. There are occasional updates from the Qubes repo of course, but there is no productive work supposed to be happening in dom0 whatsoever. You wonât be handling .rpm packages there.
That is why for understanding how Qubes works, in my opinion it is better to not think of it as a Fedora running client VMs, although technically it might be somewhat true. Iâm not an expert Qubes user nor any kind of expert though, so I might as well be wrong.
Yeah honestly I always thought it was a terrible decision to use Fedora for that purpose. Aside from the silliness of using an entire Linux distro as a glorified GUI, tâs not even a particularly light distro. Glad to hear theyâre working on a replacement.
I think they choose to use Fedora for driver support reasons, since Qubes needs more up-to-date hardware to run fluently. Whether that decision was sensible has been disputed, but I do not know enough to judge - Iâm sure happy it runs on my Librem though.
Allowing for other distros at GUI level has been on the roadmap for at least 3 years now. Itâs hard to estimate for me how those plans might change with the more recent idea of cloudifiying Qubes, but it would seem even more logical to minimize the (future) GUI qube if you want to be able to potentially run it as master on another machine.
But all that has little to do with the original topic of managing to install it in the first place I notice, so Iâll stop going OT now.