Qubes OS 4.1.2
Paranoia, as a general rule, is not a good thing. Yet, somehow, when it comes to Linux, the word takes on a shade of meaning that seems less, well, paranoid - more about security and privacy than tin hats and radio waves from the ether.
In this, it's not so much about looking under the bed to see if some nefarious government agency is spying on us. Rather, we want to keep our systems safe from the prying algorithms of corporate capitalism; stop the avalanche of spam that overwhelms so many others; and protect ourselves from the chance that some hacker with time on her hands would get a giggle from taking over our machine.
Hence, the varied and assorted Linux distros and apps designed to safeguard privacy and security, be it the Tor Browser or Qubes OS. The latter project describes itself as a "Free and open-source, security-oriented operating system for single-user desktop computing."
Which, after a week or so of playing with Qubes, I can say, "Damn right it is!"
It takes a lot for a distro to impress me, and I'm hardly Qube's target audience - a freelance writer whose Internet privacy was compromised years ago with my first AOL e-mail address. But the distro both fascinated and transfixed me, and one bit of progress in making it work made me want to move to the next bit, and then the next and the next. I don't know that I'd ever use Qubes as my daily driver, but I'm glad it's there if I do need it for that purpose.
The caveat here - and it's a big one: Qubes is not for the faint of heart. It's complicated and demanding, and it needs to be run in just such a way or you won't be able to use it effectively. This is not because, like some interesting projects (EasyOS comes to mind), that it's a work in progress. It isn't. Qubes is just that hard-wired and focused on security. How many other distros require user permission to get a USB mouse to work?