After many years of work, the team is pleased to announce the first release candidate for Qubes 4.1!

Qubes 4.1 includes several major new features, each of which is explained in depth in its own article:

This release candidate also includes numerous other improvements and bug fixes, which are listed in the release notes and in the issue tracker.

Finally, Qubes 4.1 features the following updated default components:

  • Xen 4.14
  • Fedora 32 in dom0
  • Fedora 34 template
  • Debian 11 template
  • Whonix 16 Gateway and Workstation templates
  • Linux kernel 5.10

Qubes 4.1-rc1 is available on the downloads page.

How to test Qubes 4.1-rc1

If you’re willing to test this release candidate, you can help to improve the stable release by reporting any bugs you encounter. Experienced users are strongly encouraged to join the testing team!

There are two ways to migrate to 4.1-rc1:

Release candidate planning

As with any initial release candidate, it’s likely that user testing will reveal important bugs that we’ll want to fix before the stable release. Depending on the severity of the bugs discovered and how long it takes to fix them, we expect that it may be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before we announce the second release candidate.