Preparation

Grab your USB of choice and get ready to flash the Qubes OS ISO image. This is the first step towards having Qubes on your machine, and it is important that you take the necessary steps to verify because there is no point to doing everything right on a corrupted system.

Depending on your current system, you will need software to flash the Qubes ISO to your USB drive.

On Windows, Rufus is the tool for you. Make sure you have it downloaded and read on.

On macOS, you have two options, balenaEtcher which is a GUI program, or the dd command.

On Linux, I recommend using the dd command on the terminal. I won’t give the command yet because we haven’t downloaded the ISO yet (and I want you to verify the PGP!!)

Choose the stable release.

Another choice you will have to make is whether you torrent the ISO file or download straight from their website.

Don’t think too much about it, if you have a VPN and want it downloaded quickly, torrent it. Otherwise just download from their website.

Once you have it downloaded move on to the next page.