Qubes
Configure your Qubes
Find out where Qubes differs from other distros and join the single-use society with Disposable qubes.
After fumbling your way around Qubes for a few minutes, you’ll likely be impressed. But you’ll also likely have noticed that some fairly standard desktop things don’t seem to work the same. One of these is copying and pasting, particularly between qubes. The main desktop uses a global clipboard, while the other qubes all have their own private clipboards. So, the usual Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V work as expected while inside a particular qube. But if you want to copy something from one clipboard to another, you need to also use the global clipboard. This is just a matter of some additional digit gymnastics, namely Ctrl+C to first copy to the qube’s clipboard, then Ctrl+Shift+C to copy to the global clipboard. Then in the qube you want to paste into, do Ctrl+Shift+V to paste the global clipboard into the qube’s clipboard, then finally Ctrl+V to paste. When you use the global clipboard, you’ll see a notification of exactly how many bytes are being transferred, so you’ll know if any clipboard hijacking malware is afoot.
You might want to copy files between qubes – that is OK, but do be careful about, say, taking some malware sample you downloaded in the Untrusted qube and copying to somewhere where it could do harm. That would undermine the whole security by isolation thing. Anyway, you can’t use regular drag and drop to copy files between qubes, but if you right-click any file in the Thunar File Manager, you’ll see a Copy To Other Qube option. Which does what you want. Generally speaking, it’s better to copy in the direction of higher trust to lower trust, with some obvious exceptions (for example, don’t put super-secret files on an Untrusted qube).