Qubes OS Summit 2025

I'm the founder and project lead of Spectrum, an in-development compartmentalized operating system. It's heavily inspired by Qubes OS, but also does a lot of things differently. This talk will highlight differences between Spectrum and Qubes OS, with a particular focus on user and developer experience, explain the reasoning behind those differences, and highlight what Qubes OS might be able to take from Spectrum's experience doing things differently. Particular areas covered will include Spectrum's immutable host system and purely functional build process; tight integration between base OS, desktop environment, and VMs; use of XDG Desktop Portals; and focus on avoiding the need for system maintenance work from users.