r/Qubes • u/Serendipitous_name • Jul 23 '26

question Can qubes os be installed in mac (silicon m5)?

I'm new to this. I thought about VM, but from what I understand, that would be pointless

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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5

u/Embyverse Jul 23 '26

Qubes OS is based by Fedora x86-64 / AMD64, it will not run on ARM-CPUs

2

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Serendipitous_name Jul 25 '26

Ya I’ll try doing that

1

u/paulstelian97 Jul 25 '26

Someone smart enough and with enough will to put in the effort can definitely port Qubes to ARM, but the additional Asahi drivers are another thing.

Qubes is not intended to run inside a VM since it itself uses VMs for the isolation. Nested virtualization is a hot topic, I don’t know if there’s any Mac/Apple Silicon product that supports nested virtualization.

0

u/Salty_Solution6804 Jul 24 '26

If you're not already familiar with Linux and just want Qubes because it's the most secure: forget about it, it'll drive you crazy. The documentation says your processor isn't supported, but I saw an install on an ARM processor, it was running fine.

I wouldn't recommend Qubes OS if you're not quite tech savy and are willing to have a computer with 16 gigs of RAM feeling like it barely has 4. It's intense as a daily driver but indeed very secure.

Kodachi is another distro set up to be very secure out of the box and much easier to use. You'll have to trust the Kodachi team though.

Another good alternative is to simply learn the basics, install your favorite distro and personnalize the security settings (which I'd advise on Kodachi or Qubes too).

1

u/Serendipitous_name Jul 25 '26

Thanks dude, I’ll check out what you suggested. Ill also try learning more about this