Qubes Laptop In Route
Life on life's terms sent me scrambling for one.
Six weeks ago I noted that a Minimal Qubes Laptop was going to be not quite $300. Some things changed around here and I spent closer to $400 on this lovely, a six year old 17” Dell Precision 7730. That review covers an I9, mine is a Xeon E-2176M.
There are a number of answers to “Why?” but the primary driver is me getting out and about more. COVID19 be damned, 2024 demands I periodically haul my carcass across the wilds of BARTistan to do things in person.
A car crash thirty years ago makes me not want to carry even my 2.3 pound Mac Air in my over the shoulder Targus backpack. I’ve got an enormous High Sierra Freewheel that serves as an overnight bag and I’m crossing fingers it’ll take a laptop this size without too much trouble. I bet it won’t lay flat in the pack but that’s fine, just as long as I get to drag it behind me rather than carrying it slung. The base 7730 weighs three times what the Mac Air does.
A need that remains unfilled is sorting out how to tether cell phones to Qubes. WiFi hotspot is NOT the answer here - I expect to run general network stuff via WiFi, or preferably ethernet, and I must have USB tethered phone access for a single qube. If you’ve been reading Tool Time you already know the new persona ritual:
Get a burner phone with hotspot.
Create Gmail, get Google Voice number.
Register for whatever anti-social media platforms.
Tether laptop to get into all the things.
Maybe Authy, Signal, etc bound to GV.
Never, EVER let it touch home/office WiFi.
Those of you who are attentive will have already added two and two - I’ll be dragging this enormous machine around BART because of what I mentioned in New Mission, New Burner. In this instance I can just use the on premise WiFi for what I’d do with the burner at home, but I need to be able to get into other stuff without entangling that with the client’s network. Logically it’s still the same “tether for a subset of qubes” problem, just in reverse and at a different physical location.
Specifications:
The Precision 7730 is sold as a workstation replacement and they are NOT kidding. Just look at this:
Xeon E-2176M six core processor.
Four SODIMM ram slots for up to 64GB.
Four M.2 storage slots(!).
SD card slot, smart card slot
May have optional 2.5” SATA drive bay /w four cell battery.
May have Nvidia GTX 1060 equivalent GPU.
DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI ports.
The CPU offers 80% of the performance of my older twelve core E5-2695v2. Since I’ve largely stopped using Gephi I seldom run into any computational limits; this will be plenty of power for anything I do regularly.
There are three display options - 1600x900, 1920x1080, or 3840x2160. I’m not sure what I’m getting in this area, the price was attractive enough that I couldn’t let it slip even if it’s a 1600x900. I don’t think I’d care for 4k, even on a 17.3” display, 1920x1080 is enough. If I were going to do a workstation replacement with this I would add a large Samsung 4k as primary with a separate mouse/keyboard, using the laptop display as my wing monitor.
This laptop was purchased for mobile duties but I’m pretty sure that means it’s going to end up a daily driver running Qubes. I was using this on my #2 HP Z420, but it exceeded my tolerance for fan noise, and I’m not willing to pay for another liquid cooling setup, given how cheap the Z440s are becoming.
Next Up:
I came up with a legitimate business reason for this laptop. I’m having much more trouble trying to express why a $550 Pixel 8 is a need, rather than a want, especially given the Calypso 4 that appeared less than a month ago in New Mission, New Burner.
I don’t care at all for the Calypso 3 that preceded it late last year, it’s so underpowered even I notice the drag … but swapping to a second Calypso 4 would be a five minute $40 transition.
I could mumble about monthly phone plan costs and try to shoehorn the duties spread across multiple burner phones into a single Pixel 8 … which would be great until one of them needs to make the transition from “compartment” to “evidence”, and then the horror begins in earnest.
Even so … the features of GrapheneOS are REALLY enticing, this OS comes from the same place as Qubes, a world where the worst case estimate is the foundation of every decision.
This is the right answer for someone who NEEDS a mobile device, but who can’t or won’t compartmentalize at the device level. That’s not me, but it IS the sort of thing I hear from people I’m advising.
I need a $550 gig that pays in the form of a Pixel 8 so I don’t have to look at the funds and ponder all the other things I should do instead.
