To be clear to readers, the 100GB disk means the Whonix virtual drives will dynamically grow as needed up to 100GB. Mentioning as Whonix is a great tool and that may be confusing to people who never dealt with VMs much before.
I recommend using the CLI gateway. You can get by with less than 512MB easy and don't really ever have to do anything beyond initial setup which is almost entirely automated and what isn't is in their setup guide.
You can also lower the amount of RAM for the Workstation VM if you'd like, it really isn't that resource hungry.
It's not that QubesOS won't fit in a VM, it would require virtualizing and fooling Xen which isn't like virtualizing an OS from what I know, though I'm not that knowledgeable on hypervisors but they don't function like traditional OS's which is what Virtual Box is focused on.
Whonix is agnostic towards what you set it up on but Virtual Box is easiest for people just getting into it. Qubes is for the more hardcore crowd who don't need to be told how to set up Whonix in virtual machine software.
QubesOS is interesting, I've played with it; not for the faint of heart. Great for a beefy travel laptop but for a desktop experience I think it may be too cumbersome. You could just have a Tails setup on QubesOS or yeah Whonix if you want persistence from tor browsing. You could have a silo'd Tor browser as well.
Setting things up to a "daily driver" level of usable is some work and frankly if someone got the QubesOS computer and managed to log in, unless they know what the hell QubesOS is they're not going to know what the fuck they're looking at.
I think QubesOS is for privacy and/or security extremists but these types tend to have tailored workflows already that would be cumbersome to anyone else but works for them. If you're particularly worried about malware, then QubesOS is perfect since you can just trash and rebuild an environment super quick, but if that isn't a concern then other methods for what you're going for are probably better.
Share your thoughts when you try it out, please! None of my friends will fucking bother and I don't know anyone else who has actually given it an honest try. My next travel laptop will be acquired with QubesOS in mind and I'm going to give it another try, my current best one with 16GB of RAM just isn't up to it. 3 VMs max before it bitches at me that I'm running low on memory.
All great points my good man. I just fuck about with this stuff for shits and giggles. Probably to an autistic extent sometimes, that's why I don't mind sharing my findings.
Always happy to be schooled by someone with a superior understanding.
EDIT:
Oops, missed your last paragraph there!
Share your thoughts when you try it out, please! None of my friends will fucking bother and I don't know anyone else who has actually given it an honest try. My next travel laptop will be acquired with QubesOS in mind and I'm going to give it another try, my current best one with 16GB of RAM just isn't up to it. 3 VMs max before it bitches at me that I'm running low on memory.
Well, I got a spare SSD with half its lifetime left on it. It's a Samsung and that fucker has done me proud so far, so why not? I'm taking it out of one machine and have no use for it otherwise. I read that Qubes translates very well to being put on SSD and working well over a USB3 connection (most modern computers have this, but old laptops may not). So we will see.
Again, it's just for shits and giggles. I started off with Linux Mint Julia over a decade ago. I didn't expect it to work. To find my fucking network card, but it did and it connected to the net automagically.
If all goes well, then I'll set it up on this machine, then test it on my travel laptop, maybe tweak it, but I guess it either works or don't. Travel laptop only has 8GB as well, but this main machine I'm testing on now will get a major RAM upgrade in the next days. It just about works anyway, but it's slow as hell.
The other main machine that I would plug this portable SSD in to would be at my folk's house and that has 12GB of RAM. Has USB3. I wouldn't expect it to work, but would be nice if it did. That machine needs a lot of work. In fact, it's a bit kaput, so would be nice to get this going to get old files off there. I can use one of several other Linux USB boot disks to do that. But still...
I realise that VM's need more RAM to run, but it's odd how I can boot Knoppix in to what is basically a Debian like distro and then run Virtual Box off there and run fucking Windows XP/7 off it again! And it works just fine.
I think QubesOS is for privacy and/or security extremists
Yeah, that's the main reason for me trying it. But if you do the crash course of reading through the main Qubes and Whonix pages, then I think anyone would be an extremist by that point when you realise just how hard the average punter is getting data raped and privacy raped in their day to day browsing. For another thread...
I've got nothing to hide, so really nothing to fear (okay mum, we can talk about the brazilian tranny porn later if you like). A lot of this is just an intellectual exercise to me. But I wonder if they day might come when it might really be needed.
Events lately on the farms make this more pertinent than ever, so I'm glad to explore it all a bit more. Most people can't set up Linux. Not that it does you much good anyway. Even running a VPN is not a panacea.
Whatevs, I'm going to give this a go (I hate chucking out old SSD's - especially a Samsung). And Qubes running Whonix in a VM seems ideal. I'll probably see if I can run Win7 and WinXP in there just for fun. Hell, if I ever get that far, I'll install fucking Win98 on the fucker as well!
What a time to be alive!
