4.3-rc2 ISO is it safe to use?

[bearsinger]

I have a USB flash drive that I fully trust because I have used it to install Qubes for years. Unfortunately, it is only 8 GB, and the Qubes ISO exceeded this size by 100 MB in the latest release. I noticed that 4.3-rc2 is the latest ISO that fits my USB stick. My question is: is it safe to use 4.3-rc2 and then update my system using qubes-dom0-update? What commits have been made since RC2; is there anything critical for security that updating from RC2 would not address?

Also, it would be great to have official signed ISO images without Fedora templates; I think that would reduce the size significantly. I don't use Fedora at all for my VMs, and there may be others like me. I could buy a larger USB flash drive, but it wouldn't be as safe as using my old stick that I fully trust.

Thanks.

[qubist]

On Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:08:51 +0000 'bearsinger' via qubes-users wrote:

> My question is: is it safe to use 4.3-rc2 and then update my system
> using qubes-dom0-update?

In principle, as long as the updater of 4.3-rc2 works fine (which I
have not tested on that particular version), then you should be able to
upgrade and apply any subsequent (incl. security-critical) patches.

Consider this before you doing anything:

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qubes-os-installation-only-has-dom0/33150

It is not fixed even in 4.3.0 and caused me a lot of confusion.

> I could buy a larger USB flash drive, but it wouldn't be as safe as
> using my old stick that I fully trust.

If you want a USB drive you can trust, consider Nitrokey Storage. It's
firmware is FOSS and you can rebuild it with a custom size of the
non-encrypted volume. It also has a setting (through its app) to make
the storage read-only which is additional security.

> Also, it would be great to have official signed ISO images without
> Fedora templates

Or with minimal templates.