Announcing Qubes OS Release 2!

Today we're releasing Qubes OS R2! I'm not gonna write about all the cool features in this release because you can find all this in our wiki and previous announcements (R2-beta1, R2-beta2, R2-beta3, R2-rc1, and R2-rc2). Suffice to say that we've come a long way over those 4+ years from a primitive proof of concept to a powerful desktop OS which, I believe, it is today.

One of the biggest difficulties we have been facing with Qubes since the very beginning, has been the amount of this extra, not-so-exciting, not directly security-related work, but so much needed to ensure things actually work. Yet, the line between what is, and what is not-security related, is sometimes very thin and one can easily cross it if not being careful.

It's great that we're receiving more and more community contributions. This includes not only bug fixes, but also invaluable efforts related to documentation, HCL maintenance, as well as some really non-trivial new features (advanced backups support, Debian and Arch templates, TorVM, Whonix port, etc). Thanks!

I'm also happy to announce that Caspar Bowden, a well known privacy advocate, expert on EU data protection law, member of the board of Tor, former Microsoft Chief Privacy Adviser, etc, will be taking a role as Qubes Policy Adviser, helping us to make Qubes OS more suitable for a wider audience of people interested in privacy, and be liaising  with other projects that would like to build privacy services with Qubes as a base.

And there is still a lot in front of us. Using the obligatory car analogy, I would say Qubes OS is currently like a racing car that just went into production as a road vehicle: one hell of an engine under-the-hood, and powerful new technologies until now unavailable even for professional use, yet lacking leather interior with 12-speaker audio system, and still with a manual transmission... This is just the beginning for making security by isolation on the desktop as "driveable" as a [insert your fav make of German fine cars] :)

Exciting stuff is coming next: the Release 3 (“Odyssey”) and more, stay tuned!

Thanks to everyone who has made Qubes OS possible, as well as all the upstream projects without which we would probably never even try this journey: Xen, Linux, Xorg, and many others!