the need to try out new software or tweak any settings, so he can do everything he needs to do on a daily basis without having to interact with the command line. Carol, the investor Carol works hard and lives below her means so that she can save money and invest it for her future. She hopes to become financially independent and maybe even retire early someday, and she’s decided that her best bet for achieving this is by investing for the long term and allow compounding to do its work. However, after doing some research into her country’s consumer financial protection laws, she learned that there’s no legal guarantee that customers will be made whole in the event of theft or fraud. The various insurance and protection organizations only guarantee recovery in the case of a financial institution failing, which is quite different from an individual customer being hacked. Moreover, even though many financial institutions have their own cybercrime policies, rarely, if ever, do they explicitly guarantee reimbursement in the event that a customer gets hacked (rather than the institution itself). Carol looked into how thieves might actually try to steal her hard-earned wealth and was surprised to learn that they have all sorts of ploys that she had never even considered. For example, she had assumed that any theft would, at the bare minimum, have to involve transferring money out of her account. That seems like a safe assumption. But then she read about "pump and dump" attacks, where thieves buy up some penny stock, hack into innocent people's brokerage accounts, then use the victims' funds to buy that same penny stock, "pumping" up its price so that the thieves can "dump" their shares on the market, leaving the victims with worthless shares. No money is ever transferred into or out of the victims' account; it's just used to buy and sell securities. So, all the safeguards preventing new bank accounts from being added or requiring extra approval for outbound transfers do nothing to protect victims' funds in cases like these. And this is just one example! Carol realized that she couldn't assume that existing safeguards against specific, known attacks were enough. She had to think about security at a more fundamental level and design it into her digital life from the ground up. After learning about all this, Carol decided that it was ultimately up to her to take care of her own cybersecurity. She couldn’t rely on anyone else to do it for her. Sure, most people just use regular consumer tech and will probably end up fine, but, she reminded herself, most people also don’t have as much to lose. It’s not a risk that she was willing to take with her future, especially knowing that there’s probably no government bailout waiting for her and that all the brokerage firms’ vaguely reassuring marketing language about cybersecurity isn’t legally binding. So, Carol started reading more about computer security and eventually stumbled upon Qubes OS after searching the web for “most secure operating system.” She read about how it’s designed and why. Although she didn’t immediately understand all of the technical details, the fundamental principle of security-by-compartmentalization (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/architecture/) made intuitive sense to her, and the more she learned about the technical aspects, the more she realized that this is what she’d been looking for. Today, her setup looks like this: