Has anyone faced this issue before or have any suggestions?
I can see from your screenshot that you're trying to install Qubes 4, and you commented that you have no VT-D. You mayde sure its not just disabled?
Write "lscpu" in your dom0 terminal, and find the CPU processor name. Then you can yourself, or put the name here and we can do it for you, quickly check if your CPU supports VT-D or not.
Qubes 4 is much more strict towards missing hardware support than Qubes 3.2. Specifically the security/privacy hardware support features. Qubes is meant to be about security, by making it only install on security enabling hardware, falls within reasonable so that no one install Qubes on unsafe hardware, and thereby falsely believe to be "safe".
The most dangerous kind of lack of security around, is ironically not technical of nature. The most dangerous one, is the attitude, or belief, that you're safe, when you in fact are not. Think of it like ancient humans sleeping on the havana, and lions sneak around in the grass. Because you're not on watch, i.e. build a house or barricaded a cave entrance, then you'll likely die pretty darn fast. The same applies to Qubes, this move, in my view, is the developers kindly pushing us all to buy VT-D (and similar) security enabling hardware.
However, you can probably still install Qubes 3.3 and sleep on the hanava just fine. The type of attacks that affect you, are rare enough, to justify Qubes 3.2. on a no VT-D (or similar tech) machine. And it's more likely to work on a non VT-D machine, than Qubes 4 which require VT-D instead of just recommending it.
Also Qubes 3.2. should be updated for a while yet, https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2016/09/02/4-0-minimum-requirements-3-2-extended-support/
Your welcome :)
I hope your new laptop will run Qubes 4 smoothly, it can be a hit and miss sometimes, but generally you can reduce the risk by i.e. checking if it supports VT-D, like you already did :)
I definitely agree too that more could be done to communicate, sadly, despite how pretty awesome Qubes is, communication with its communicate, seems to be its weak point. Most people around here seem to care about each others, it's just, there is so little organizing and corporation, both within the community, and between the community and developers.
But having said that, the developers are awesome to step in and help fix user issues, despite being so busy. It's just, I think at least, that Qubes could use more staff members to help fostering the community a bit more. I.e. like you said, help communicate so people don't fall into security traps, instead of relying purely on OS system designs to make sure people don't get into trouble. A mix of both, seems like a good balance.
> I actually installed 3.2 and found some interesting solutions to
> annoying things, an example such as fedora goes amok in large fonts with
> high resolution displays that have been scaled down( solution is to
> install gnome-tweak-tool in fedora and scale down and up again,
> resetting the system). That works. These things, I would like to share
> with others, if they run a laptop with a screen resolution of 3200x1800
> scaled down. I might have provided a simple guide to Yoga 2 Pro users,
> but I think it won't be worth the hasle, when 3.2 soon hits EOL. But
> experience is always best, shared.
I received an update a week or so back, taht reset my fedora-template fonts and sizing, that I had to erdo the aobe, so I wrote a guide, in case other high-resolution laptops use Qubes
Sincerely
Max