> Most people are using it because of technical reasons, not based on how it looks

Plenty of us consider both. Qubes is the only game in town, and also competing with macOS 14 and Windows 11. These systems look good and are quite usable out of the box.

The take-it-or-leave-it attitude popular with some community members doesn't help much with retention either.

I already know the Qubes-specific bits (templates etc). I don't want to have to put a lot of work into set up just to make it usable visually.

I left Qubes as a daily driver because I could never get watching videos to be a pleasant experience. I believe this is due to the lack of GPU acceleration.

For the modest amount of developer resources they have, 4.2 appears to be a rather significant release.

I used Qubes a few years ago. I highly agree.

I found a very good looking theme for XFCE back then, but to make it usable I had to edit it myself and add the colored borders. It's been a while so no longer have all the files.

It needs to look good right out of the box to help adoption.

Perhaps try KDE?

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/kde/

> I left Qubes as a daily driver because I could never get watching videos to be a pleasant experience.

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improving-video-playback-speed/...

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hd-video-playback-on-qubes-os-o...

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/improve-video-playback-performa...

and

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/8962

Thanks. I was a Qubes user for years, across multiple computers. When things worked well, I found it to be easier than a regular Linux install to administer. Despite plenty of time and effort, there were some issues I was never able to resolve. I often ended up either using two computers or dual/triple booting, which tended to result in spending more time in the side that "just works".

How is your personal experience now? Does youtube in a browser work well for you? How about watching a movie saved locally?

You should ask for help on the forums. In general, the Community always finds a way to solve users' problems.

I do not watch movies or Youtube very often, but it seems to be working fine.

personally I'm obsessed with the Chicago95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95