~ / heritage

The Secure Desktops project

Before this site existed, secure-os.org was the home of the Secure Desktops mailing list — a quiet but remarkable forum where the secure-desktop-OS community talked to each other. If you followed an old /pipermail/ archive link to get here, this page is a summary of what that archive was.

What it was

Secure Desktops was a GNU Mailman mailing list hosted on this domain. According to its charter, it was a forum for discussing the security and privacy challenges of open-source desktop computing and for collaboration between the projects working on them — explicitly favouring open source, collaboration over competition, and no closed-source vendor marketing. The list orbited the secure-desktop-OS world: Qubes OS, Tails, Whonix, Subgraph and Genode.

The public archive that survives on the Internet Archive begins in late 2015. We can't verify what, if anything, predates that snapshot, so this page only describes the archived portion.

What was discussed

The topics were the everyday engineering problems of building trustworthy desktops. One concrete example, from a message archived in December 2015, is a thread on entropy, seeding and randomness — the difficulty of gathering good entropy on live and VM-heavy systems such as Tails — which a list member (posting as sycamoreone) proposed to discuss in person at 32C3, the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress. The congress ran a public assembly wiki at the time, listed on the 32c3 wiki.

What happened to it

The mailing list is no longer active and the domain eventually lapsed. When we acquired it in 2026, we chose to preserve the history rather than erase it: the charter is restored at its historical URL, old /pipermail/ archive links redirect here, and our guides pick up the same questions the list worked on. Of the projects the list orbited, Qubes, Tails and Whonix are still actively developed today.

Where the questions went

The problems the list worked on are still open, and our launch guides map directly onto them: Qubes OS and security by compartmentalization, Tails and amnesic computing, Whonix and leak-proof Tor isolation, hardened Linux distros compared by threat model, and full disk encryption in practice.

Sources: Internet Archive snapshots of secure-os.org, including the /pipermail/desktops/ archives (from late 2015) and the /desktops/charter/ page. Page published June 12, 2026.