It has a lot of unique security features and most are hardware dependant so don't slow your machine to a crawl - and any Intel or AMD CPU made in the last few years will be compatible, it mostly just needs hardware backed virtualization, that's been standard for a fair bit.

As usual there is a tradeoff between security and convenience though. In order for the security model to work you need to adopt your threat model to always use a separate VM for everything and don't accidentally use your social media VM for banking for example.

It's also got some pretty cool privacy stuff like Whonix is built in. That's pretty awesome, can make VMs that only connect via Tor.

Oh but I couldn't make it work with Windows. Although it technically does have W11 support, the TPM can't be found through the virtualization, and W11 has a requirement for a TPM 2.0 to be present. Microsoft patched up an old method of bypassing the check by creating registry keys in the installer.

So I just put Windows 11 back on that machine because it's just my cheap "travel laptop" mostly for media consumption and Windows is just convenient for that.

But I do really like Qubes security model. Might consider moving from Ubuntu when I finally get around to upgrading the M.2 SSD in my laptop. Need more storage and RAM too for that matter. 16GB ain't what it used to be.