Even while businesses promote government policy that looks to treat workers as rich and businesses as poor, they understand (as can be seen by lots of product pricing policies) that businesses are rich and individuals are poor. How many products have you seen with a cheap (or free) personal or family option, then expensive business or enterprise option? This is how the economy should be structured. Businesses should fund the government budgets and individuals should have lots of stuff (like public transport, or basic housing) provided free.
Business options usually are more expensive than private/personal ones, but that's because - for various reasons - they can be charged more. Sometimes they even subsidize the personal versions (and/or personal versions are seen as marketing vectors that help in securing B2B deals). So the structure you mention already exists in the economy - the money just doesn't seem to make its way towards funding public services.
I nuked my Ubuntu Mate laptop and installed Qubes, just to get a feel for it. It's significantly more maintenance than a vanilla distro, because of all the separated environments, but if I ever wanted to return to Linux on the desktop as my main OS, I'd absolutely use it. It's the only BYOD/WFH solution I've found that feels even close to secure enough if you don't want to run physically separate PCs.
Security wise, QubesOS is better than separate PCs since (at least in part) isolating the network card into a separate VM prevents it from having direct memory access to the whole system (I think devices do have DMA?)
It also provides a better way to communicate between VMs through simple RPC commands rather than hoping USB device drivers are not malicious
In terms of maintenance, I'm pretty sure you could have only one templateVM for everything, which means you only have to update dom0 and that templateVM. So in terms of maintenance thats really not that much more I guess?
I think I might try that myself actually
If you need persistence in the root filesystem, that could mean a standalone VM or a new VM. Last I tried I had trouble with their AppVM solution on that
I work somewhere that specialises in secondhand enterprise equipment and storage. The answer to your first question is "yes, but they really shouldn't". We're burning more hours than we can spare dealing with drive failures. Sure, we have RAID arrays capable of withstanding multiple failures, but we still find ourselves scrambling to replace drives faster than they're failing, even when they were tested before they were put in the spare pile.
Also, fuck Chia. It was supposed to be a low-power "proof of storage", but it's really "proof of prior work" and burns even more energy than proof of work since you need to constantly power the cryptographic calculations AND storage.
Having recently attempted to move from LastPass to Bitwarden, only to have to abandon it due to sudden changes that broke third party integration without consultation or a sensible solution, I'd say this whole drama on brand.
The red flags above were compiled over 20 years of interviewing but honestly it's gotten worse and most of it was the last 10 years. In fact, 80% of the above was experienced in my last job search cycle.
I've managed to avoid leetcode/hackerrank due to my industry/niche/seniority, but orgs manage to invent their own BS.
