Yeah, Qubes feels just a few versions away from being really very nice to use too. But there's still quite a few pain points for me, most notably anything GPU related. And also a general lack of detailed documentation that's quite frustrating. The default security can be improved a lot too. Running a full-blown linux distro in net-vm and firewall-vm is sort of silly, really. Leaves a lot of unnecessary attack surface, and wastes a bunch of memory too.
There's also qubsd which is a qubes like thing for Freebsd, leveraging zfs, jails and bhyve. Looks really promising, but is still in a lot of dev flux. Definitely gonna switch to it when it's solid enough though. Because it looks like a better way to set up your own custom qubes-like setup.
I've been daily driving it for 5 years now on an old Lenovo Thinkpad. No major issues the whole time. I think people solve the GPU issue by using multiple GPUs, that way one can be dedicated to dom0 and the other can be passed through to an HVM OS. People play games in a windows vm, within qubes, so it is do-able. I don't have the hardware to test this out myself, all my machines are single GPU.
Yeah, I've been trying to set something like this up with a combination of iGPU and dGPU, which theoretically should be possible, but I certainly haven't gotten it to work as yet, and the documentation(and maybe the tooling too) leaves a lot to be desired. It offers ways to do some things, but very little in terms of more general explanation of all the steps, and the steps don't always apply as given(in my case, since I have pretty new hardware, they rarely apply at all). So I just have to sort of laboriously figure everything out. And it's quite a bit of dicking around to set up custom PVHs and such, again with lacking documentation.
I like Qubes quite a lot. But there's still a lot of friction if you're doing anything not supported by default.
There's also qubsd which is a qubes like thing for Freebsd, leveraging zfs, jails and bhyve. Looks really promising, but is still in a lot of dev flux. Definitely gonna switch to it when it's solid enough though. Because it looks like a better way to set up your own custom qubes-like setup.