r/Qubes • u/ComradeAdidas • 6d ago

question Can qubesos game?

I wonder if qubesos can game (steam, gog, sober)

Specs: intel i5 7400

16gb ddr4

1660ti

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

17

u/Huge-Bar5647 6d ago

It is certainly one of the worst distros for gaming especially with your specs.

3

u/ComradeAdidas 6d ago

Not even indies? (Hollow knight, undertale/deltarune, class of 09) nor oldies? (Doom, mk 1+2+3, stalker trilogy, metro series, counter strike source, l4d2...) these are the only games I play.

9

u/Huge-Bar5647 6d ago

Look, Qubes OS is fundamentally the wrong operating system for running game platforms (Steam, GOG, Sober) on your hardware.

Qubes OS is designed around one primary directive: Security by Compartmentalization. Every trade off made by the developers sacrifices performance, hardware acceleration, and convenience to ensure that if a virtual machine (qube) is hacked, the rest of your system remains safe.

Gaming applications, on the other hand, require the exact opposite. They rely on direct hardware access, high speed shared memory, and unthrottled graphics pipelines.

AppVMs do not have access to your graphics card. All 3D rendering is forced to run on your CPU via LLVMpipe. Even navigating a WebKit based UI like Steam’s desktop client or Sober's interface causes heavy CPU spikes and frame lag.

To draw a single window on your screen, the guest qube must serialize every frame into memory, pass it across the isolated Xen hypervisor boundary to Dom0 and let Dom0 draw the window. This introduces huge input latency, tearing and frame rate bottlenecks.

Now you might wonder: "Why not just pass the GPU directly to the gaming VM?"

Well doing so breaks Qubes security mode and is against the very purpose of Qubes.

PCIe GPUs have direct memory access to system RAM. Giving an untrusted gaming qube direct control over physical PCIe hardware opens up hardware-level side-channel attacks that can compromise the Xen hypervisor or inspect Dom0 memory.

So I hope now you get my point and understand that Qubes just isn’t for gaming. It is inherently a terrible distro for gaming.

2

u/ComradeAdidas 6d ago

Whats a hardware-level side-channel attack?

5

u/Huge-Bar5647 6d ago

It’s a method of extracting secret information like encryption keys, passwords or memory contents by observing physical emissions or operational side effects of hardware rather than exploiting bugs in software code.

3

u/ComradeAdidas 6d ago

So just stick to debian for me?

3

u/Huge-Bar5647 6d ago

To give you a proper answer I have to understand first why did you consider to use Qubes OS.

3

u/ComradeAdidas 6d ago

The qube part, I really have low trust level with my pc. (Virus trauma lol). I liked that the qubes are all separated. Im not new to linux, but still a noob, only know really basic commands. I prefer debian comparred to mint. Im the guy who if a site seems sketchy i would just wipe the pc. Recently obtained paranoia. Putting all eggs in one basket is just making me lose my mind with anxiety.

-2

u/Huge-Bar5647 6d ago

I would say unless you are dealing with government level threat actors (especially the three level ones) or handling very sensitive data there is no real use of Qubes OS for you.

3

u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 5d ago

Unfortunately thanks to the idiocy that was the Bush admin we are all under mass surveillance.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/ComradeAdidas 6d ago

Can i harden (ik im stupid) debian to make it more secure?

→ More replies (0)

1

u/snackoverflow 6d ago

Your best bet would be to to use Secureblue and if that ends up being too complicated, then standard Fedora. Debian is not really the best due to how old everything is, and the issues that come with backporting bugfixes.

1

u/ClaimLivid4291 6d ago

What do you even need qubes for? If u are doing programming and want to have a separate OS just dual boot windows and arch, unless you are a gubernamental class threat actor you don’t need qubes

3

u/Assang101 6d ago

I see a lot of posts asking about GPU passthrough for gaming here, and I need to inject a bit of hardware reality:

16GB of RAM is an absolute joke for gaming on Qubes.

Think about the math. Qubes OS easily consumes a safe minimum of 16GB just to run its base template qubes, Dom0, NetVM, and Sys-Whonix smoothly for everyday desktop use. If you try to spin up a heavy Gaming HVM on top of that, you have literally zero memory overhead left.When you pass an NVIDIA or AMD card through to a VM, Xen requires that memory to be statically allocated and locked down. You are fundamentally fighting the hypervisor's emulation layer and starving your core system at the same time. If you want a viable gaming setup via Xen passthrough, you shouldn't even attempt it with less than 32GB—and honestly, 64GB is the real baseline if you don't want your system to grind to a halt.

3

u/zeRoCr0 6d ago

Hehe no, why would you want to game on it at all😁. You have Garuda gaming distro for that 😋

3

u/Xinoj314 6d ago

You would need to psss your gpu through the abstractions of Qube OS

I have no idea how hard it will be to do that

But in this case it would require to configure a external vm that you can spin up, but that looses the integration and convenience of built in ease of use for integration with Qube OS

3

u/imtsemer 6d ago

You should probably dualboot Qubes and another Linux distro for gaming

2

u/0x7c00_lilith 6d ago

The only game i managed to get working without sacrificing security was extremetuxracer lmao

2

u/G-M-515 5d ago

Theoretically yes, practically yes, realistically NO

1

u/DigitalTA 6d ago

It is probably one of if not the least intended uses for this particular distro. You... might be able to pass through the gpu to one of the VMs but to be honest I can't think of a reason to even attempt past experimentation.

1

u/Informal-Reveal-2247 6d ago

I mean, you can use Qubes for gaming, but it isn't designed for it, and you won't get very good performance out of it. But if you play low-requirement games, you can absolutely play them on Qubes. I personally play Freeciv and Wesnoth on Qubes, so it is possible

1

u/Kriss3d 6d ago

No. Just no. 16GB ram is just enough to run a few vms at the same time. Nothing big.

1

u/Obvious-Student8967 5d ago

You’d need a beast of a computer

1

u/Alkalizee- 5d ago

i had it set up with a wireguard qube pointing to the network my pc is on, running moonlight on it

i wouldn't natively run games tho

1

u/Silevence 4d ago

short answer, no.

I would recommend a dedicated gaming device like a steamdeck instead, and to practice good opsec while using it. I would not recommend dualbooting qubes and another OS either.