FWIW: just over half of Latacora uses Qubes on a daily basis. We do that because "Xen VM" is a pretty great boundary; it allows me to have totally separate client environments with the convenience of a single laptop. (We've had a client have us use their endpoint before; while I generally like that client, we won't be doing that again :-))<p>It's not flawless. Sometimes switching to a big screen or moving USB devices between VMs is wonky... but the bottom line is I haven't booted my MacBook Pro for work in 2018. We stopped using MBPs because the then-current now one-minor-rev old generation is trash; all of them broke, and that was unacceptable, so I have a Lenovo (again).<p>Happy to answer questions about Qubes.<p>FWIW: not worried about Qubes' future. As Joanna herself points out in the blog post: Marek has been doing most of the technical day to day stuff for a while now, and Qubes has been doing just fine. I'm really thankful for the work Joanna has done in making Qubes happen and hope her new endeavors are everything she wants them to be :)
Joanna's brilliant, and this Golem project is fascinating. The idea of a secure remote compute arrangement is sort of a natural extension from Qubes, and this is a pretty unique approach. May she (and Qubes, and Golem) find great success.
These ICO-funded research projects are turning into the next Xerox Parc, IBM Research etc. I doubt they will ever ship something practical directly, or that the investing public will ever get their money back, but they are spending the money by hiring great engineers and researchers and giving them free rein to have fun with no budget restrictions. I suspect that will result in fundamental advances that will benefit us in the long term, like Darpanet eventually gave us the Internet.<p>I want to believe that something good will come of this, beyond incinerating cash building products nobody actually wants to use. (Yes, I’m saying that Golem as described is impractical and naive, and giving it so much funding so early makes it even harder for them to learn hard lessons and succeed as a product).<p>In a way, they found a way to trick us into paying more taxes to subsidize public research and development! You’ve got to respect that.
Golem has the potential to solve the Cloud Trustworthiness problem, and it's an interesting problem one with huge upside if it we ever get there. How do we verify that the the code we're running (e.g. the VPN we have set up on a VPS in the cloud, or the web server we're connecting to) is actually running the code it says it's running?<p>Ethereum can do that (because it's just one giant computer running the same code and verifying it's state after every functional call), it's just really, really slow and insanely expensive. Perhaps they'll figure this out, if they do, it will be awesome.
Very interesting to see her joining Golem. I have been following them for many years and I'm excited to see what they produce, but they seem to have been in a holding pattern for a while unable to produce progress in some ways. I think she'll probably help solve that.
From her new project: <a href="https://golem.network/" rel="nofollow">https://golem.network/</a><p>>> Ethereum-based transaction system<p>Is this going to be fast enough for their use cases?
Looks like Joanna left the project in good hands. She says Golem raised money but the challenge to me seems being able to verify whatever computation is being done as trustworthy/correct. Unlike in crypto transactions, it becomes hard to build a trustworthy network where computation can be verified, especially because there are so many different kinds of computations available out there
<i>Another challenge is the trustworthiness of the x86 platform.</i><p>I can only imagine that's incredibly frustrating. Knowing no matter how hard you work on Qubes, x86 isn't really deserving of trust right now.