I have an older model Dell laptop, but it's been a perfectly serviceable Debian machine for the last two years. It's my primary work computer and has been great for that. It has 4 gigs of RAM and a broadcom wireless card that Qubes is known to have trouble with.

Problem 1: Wireless must be disabled or install hangs. There's some reasonable documentation in Google groups about this issue. Apparently, one can disable the card in BIOS, do the install, then manually install the driver and manually install the card. I've been trying this and it allowed me to finish installing and boot into dom0. I figure I'd be onto installing the card BUT. . .

Problem 2:. I can't run any qubes. If I try to start an application (say Firefox, untrusted qube, but it doesn't matter which, just ANY application), I get "Error while starting the 'untrusted' vm: PCI device 03:00.0 does not exist. (domain sys-net)". Googling THIS error brings up nada, zip, zilch, internet crickets.

So Ok, sys-net. . . Maybe it wants that wifi device enabled in BIOS, so I try that which leads to. . .

Problem 3:. With wireless enabled, system hangs with black screen after boot.

Now maybe that WON'T happen if I manually find and load those driver files, but at this point, I'm thinking I should give up and go back to Debian.

So, should I?