An illustrated way to enable openVPN on Qubes OS 4.1.2 by Eduardo Bellani

In my view, Qubes OS lives up to its motto: A reasonably secure operating system. I use it for work and personal matters every day.

One challenging bit, when you use it in a work setting specially, is to set up a VPN qube for your app qubes.

There are probably other ways to do this, but the way I chose to structure my setup was the following:

After you create your app qube for the VPN and assuming your template is Debian, go to the template terminal (Debian 11) and run:

  $ sudo apt install openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome

After this you should enable the network-manager service:

Here comes the (for me) obscure trick: after importing your opvn file through the network manager:

  1. Go to IPv4 Settings tab
  2. Click to the Routes... button
  3. Select the Use this connection only for resources on its network

Why does it work? I don’t know. If you do, please email me.