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Tom Zander
Blog: https://zander.github.io
Vlog: https://vimeo.com/channels/tomscryptochannel
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I liked the old tool. However, I am also on the side of agreeing with its
removal.
The old tool was useful, but it wasn't any good. As Tom Zander suggested earlier,
someone else should create a new GUI. Like him, I also took a look at it but
decided not to, since Python is one of the languages I like the least, and when
it comes to unpaid work, I prefer doing it in a language I actually enjoy using.
There may be people out there that enjoy writing GUIs in Python, and I'm sure the
entire Qubes community would be immensly grateful if someone stepped up to the
task. I certainly would be.
Im a visual person and having this made it feel safe and secure to watch what was going on fast and making changes fast. I know of only 2 other people that use qubes personally. Both of which when I told them had the same response I did.
There was no reason to remove it when you could opt to not use it. Or make the gui more appealing but to replace it and claim "advanced users can use the command line", I stand by my original remark. I definitely will not be using 4.
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> On Wednesday, 6 December 2017 16:08:28 CET Unman wrote:
> > "useful, but wasnt any good" - do you mean buggy or poorly designed?
> > What 2 features should be implemented/fixed?
> >
> > I confess I rarely use the Manager, so don't have a feel for what's wrong
> > with it.
>
> To be clear, the main reason the old one is removed seems to be that it
> would have had to be reimplemented due to the architecture changes in 4.0
I had a script that updated the templatevms and it was written in Python,
taking advantage of the API. This script stopped working in 4.0. I rewrote
it to use the commandline tools instead.
Perhaps a new UI could also be based on those tools. Without a need to use
Python, such UI could be implemented in any language. That would be an
interesting project.
> To support the point of view of "useful but wasn't any good", let me explain
> what I think such a tool should behave like.
I was the one who said that, and your statement is an almost spot-on summary
of my opinion.
> The first issue with the old tool, and also with some of the new tools, are
> that you already have to know how things work in order to be able to use it.
> For instance the terminology 'appvm', 'templatevm' etc are completely not
> explained anywhere. You have to go to a website to learn what the mean.
The 3.2 VM manager, with all is faults, did help newcomers a single place
to see what was going on. It's not harder in 4.0, but I'd imagine that to
a newcomer it would look a lot more opaque.
This, I believe, is the most important feature of a new UI; the ability
to guide a new user to the proper usage of the OS.
> A clear success story of Qubes is its networking, abstracting the netVm is
> done to add security without having any significant impact on usability.
> Practically speaking, normal users can ignore the whole networking setup as
> it "just works".
For a new UI, I imagine a graphical representation of the networking setup.
Think boxes with arrows, showing connections, ports, IP-addresses, etc.
In fact, hardware assignments could be represented there as well.
Do a Google image search for "flow control ui" to see what I'm thinking of.
> * Which VMs are in which state. If you start something and the netvm/
> firewall VM are auto-started, this is not at all clear to the user. If
> something fails, it gets even worse.
Easy access to the logs from here would be a most welcome quality-of-life
improvement.
> * Graphical configuration of multiple qubes. Even in 3.2 not being able to
> open more than one config dialog at a time was silly.
Yes. The fact that the old VM manager was blocking, and you couldn't do
anything with it while an operation was in progress was one of its biggest
flaws.
That's the point. Since I cannot write one myself,
I stopped using qubes because my use case depends on it.
Some users may only ever use firefox and nothing else, they wouldn't mind
stripping every other (cli)tool from qubes. I see no point in making up lowest possible denominators of useability.
Qubes has a unique architecure of integrating virtual machines. If there are no
proper tools to make it possible for a user to adjust this system to his specific
use case withouth the need to write a program, some people may stop using it
(also last I checked there wasn't a proper documentation on the new commands).
I don't think that's good or bad and maybe I'm the only one who's going back to a
different OS.
regards
Loved 3.2 A truly great software.
> I stopped using qubes because my use case depends on it.
I'm not going to judge the way you use the software, but I am curious
as to what kind of use case you have that made the VM manages so important
that you literally can't use Qubes without it?
On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 05:13:56PM +0100, 'Tom Zander' via qubes-users wrote:
> On Wednesday, 6 December 2017 16:08:28 CET Unman wrote:
> > "useful, but wasnt any good" - do you mean buggy or poorly designed?
> > What 2 features should be implemented/fixed?
> >
> > I confess I rarely use the Manager, so don't have a feel for what's wrong
> > with it.
>
> To be clear, the main reason the old one is removed seems to be that it
> would have had to be reimplemented due to the architecture changes in 4.0
>
Tom, this is simply not true.
If you look at issue #2132 you will see that it was a deliberate design
principle. It has nothing to do with the architecture changes and
everything to do with simplifying the UX.
I have to say that most of the users I have helped to work with Qubes
(most unfamiliar to Linux and certainly unused to the command line),
simply DO NOT USE the manager.
I myself find it strange and frustrating using Qubes VMs without the visual reminders for the templates they're based on, updates, last backup date, etc. If I need to see the template for a VM, going into VM settings feels like cognitive dissonance.
Qubes might benefit from focusing the UI on a Qubes Manager-like interface, even to the point where guest apps are launched from it. Why shoehorm the new paradigm into existing DE tools? That will not get you the attention of the DE projects or potential userbase.
Saying its supported doesnt say much if cant handle new equipment and just old machines.
I save alot of time using qubes as I need to deploy VMs all the time for clients. But not having an interface to monitor means 4 is useless to me.
Im not rich by any means living in one bedroom apt and work from home but this does help me with work and would donate towards getting this done.
On another note what would it take ($$$) for someone to create this back on 4 as an option for the community (obviously theres quite a few of us) that want this to install?
Im not rich by any means living in one bedroom apt and work from home but this does help me with work and would donate towards getting this done.
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Clearly plenty others here prefer the manager and you keep reiterating why it isnt important to you and teaching people to use email securely.
Backups and restoring backups should be a definite.
When dealing with net VMs the ability to watch which VM is attached to which netvm and what is running properly and didnt shutdown. Same features as even virtualbox uses.
Backup/restore is already on the target list.
What doesnt seem to be at the moment is the ability to show all qubes,
and how they are connected, and what their status is. That's a nice
target.
All in all its still a pain that first i found the kernel was too old for 3.2 to be installed so i switched to 4 and then find out that the feature i need was missing and back to 3.2 to get that working.
For all the new computers I setup I assume I'll have the same issue. In no way would I ever consider 4 stripped in its condition even usuable in beta becuase of my needs.
Python is bloated and slow.
I wrote my own manager for 3.2 and it does more than what theirs did, and it does it cleaner and more efficiently with much less RAM and CPU utilisation.
They never fixed the issues I told them about in the Manager for 3.2.
They updated it and made it worse.
The things I recommended be fixed, they didn't do it right even when they tried to fix it. But I think that that may have been a limitation of Python rather than them.
Glad you asked.
I'd prefer the development team focus on the security and stability of the 4.0 release candidate system and not divert any resources to the old 3.2 manager. The CLI is fine as far as I'm concerned.