Comment by handedness
4 hours ago
Give Qubes OS a shot. It's significantly less challenging to run than it used to be, and a (small, I admit) number of us daily drive it. Hardware support these days, while far from perfect, is much better. It's not the daunting slog to get it going that it used to be.
Provided you aren't looking to run accelerated graphics or care about integrated Bluetooth, you should be fine. I'd recommend any Intel laptop (and some AMDs) with built-in Ethernet, just in case it doesn't like the Wi-Fi card. Install with kernel-latest (it's a simple option when you boot into the installer ISO), and try it out. Grab a T480/T480s if you have one handy, and you may be surprised.
I have a bunch of desktops and mini desktops I have laying around I can try it on. I'm assuming it works on most Linux hardware, except maybe the wifi? For example I have a few Beelink GK Minis and Geekom computers.
Generally speaking, if your Wi-Fi works on Debian and/or Fedora, it should work on Qubes OS. There are exceptions to that, of course.
On a desktop PC you'll have to make some tradeoffs versus most laptops, namely integrating sys-net and sys-usb, but the installer will handle that for you. You'll want to auto-accept your keyboard and mouse, and try not to shut down sys-net. But you'll learn. Since your concern is isolating software you're running, and not necessarily isolating untrusted USB devices, that's not a big loss.
Give it a shot on a few machines and report back. Even better, try it and submit HCL reports to inform others: https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/ Intel is generally easier than AMD, but I've run it on pretty modern AMD mobile chipsets with a lot of success.
Again, kernel-latest is your friend, and look online to see if anyone recommends any particular kernel flags.