Several email qubes. Since Alice is a command-line aficionado, she likes to use a terminal-based email client, so both her work and personal email qubes are based on a template with Mutt (github.com/Qubes-C…/mutt.md) installed. The email qubes where she sends and receives PGP-signed and encrypted email securely accesses the private keys in her PGP backend qube (more on that below). To guard against malicious attachments, she configured Mutt to open all attachment files in disposable qubes (www.qubes-os.org/doc/how…posables). Several qubes for communication tools, like Signal, Slack, Zoom, Telegram, IRC, and Discord. This is where she teleconferences and chats with clients. She uses USB passthrough (www.qubes-os.org/doc/how…-devices) to attach her webcam to each qube as needed and detaches it afterward. Likewise, she gives each qube access to her microphone while it’s needed, then removes access afterward. This way, she doesn’t have to trust any given video chat program’s mute button and doesn’t have to worry about being spied on when she’s not on a call. She also has a qube for social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News for networking and keeping up with new developments (or so she claims; in reality, it’s mostly for feuds over programming language superiority, Vim vs. Emacs wars, and tabs vs. spaces crusades). A GPG backend vault. Vaults are completely offline qubes that are isolated from the network. This particular vault holds Alice’s private keys (e.g., for code signing and email) and is securely accessed by several other “frontend” qubes via the Split GPG (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/split-gpg/) system. Split GPG allows only the frontend qubes that Alice explicitly authorizes to have the ability to request PGP operations (e.g., signing and encryption) in the backend vault. Even then, no qube ever has direct access to Alice’s private keys except the backend vault itself. A password manager vault. This is another completely offline, network-isolated qube where Alice uses her offline password manager, KeePassXC, to store all of her usernames and passwords. She uses the secure copy and paste (www.qubes-os.org/doc/how…ste-text) system to quickly copy credentials into other qubes whenever she needs to log into anything. Personal qubes. One of the things Alice loves the most about Qubes is that she can use it for both work and personal stuff without having to worry about cross-contamination. Accordingly, she has several qubes that pertain to her personal life. For example, she has an offline vault that holds her medical documents, test results, and vaccination records. She has another offline vault for her government documents, birth certificate, scans of her passport, and so on. She also has some personal social media accounts in a separate qube for keeping up with family members and friends from school. When she finishes her work for a given client, Alice sends off her deliverables, backs up (www.qubes-os.org/doc/how…-migrate) the qubes containing the work for that client, and deletes them from her system. If she ever needs those qubes again or just wants to reference them, she can easily restore them from her backup, and the internal state of each one will be exactly as it was when she finished that project. Bob, the investigative journalist As part of his research and reporting, Bob is frequently forced to interact with suspicious files, often from anonymous sources. For example, he may receive an email with an attachment that claims to be a tip about a story he’s working on. Of course, he knows that it could just as easily be malware intended to infect his computer. Qubes OS is essential for Bob, since it allows him to handle all this suspicious data securely, keeping it compartmentalized