GooeyGlob

Sadly more and more modern thinkpads come with soldered RAM, which IMO is a deal breaker. Work gave me an X1 Carbon Gen 13 to use, which was indeed both shockingly fast and lightweight, but had soldered RAM and a mobo failure in the first 3 months, so I kept looking for a personal device.

Ended up with a Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 with a Ryzen 7, SODIMM ram and built like a tank. Also much cheaper than the X1. It’s heavy, but I’m also not worried about it getting thrown around in my bag.

Removed by mod

Your hardware is actually more than capable. The stuttering in browsers is because Qubes no longer allows hardware acceleration. See https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/troubleshooting/media-troubleshooting.html

The other big OOTB problem is the default private storage size (i.e. /home/user) for VMs is 2GB, which is insanely small for any sort of interactive use, and needs to be bumped up just to enable a web browser’s cache to reach a reasonable size. Let alone being able to store a useful amount of data to be stored in the VM.

I think when you get past these few things, it’s more smooth sailing.

Pointless additional rambling that can be ignored:

I also at first really liked what QubesOS offers in terms of VM templating, and being able to have multiple AppVM share the same base OS template as more or less immutable (i.e. on next AppVM boot, any changes you made to the system partition in the AppVM are completely reverted to the template’s copy). So one can run multiple AppVMs without wasteful duplication of a unique system partition for each VM. This does mean one must boot up the template VM every time new system packages are needed for the AppVMs based on that template, installing the software, shutting down the template VM, then restarting the AppVM.

Ultimately I ended up just creating a bunch of Standalone VMs, and installed different software into each, rather than trying to come up with an efficient, combined template that had all the software I needed for all my app VMs. Less secure, but just more practical.

Getting used to the clipboard manager is another thing that just takes time, but eventually you get it down. All these things are there for security and I understand why they are there, but it definitely has a huge learning curve.

Put single quotes around the URL.

? and & are special characters, and the shell will think you meant something unintended if you dont protect them.