Taking virtual machines to the application level seems to be the goal of Qubes, which is yet another hypervisor based on Linux. Perhaps the name YAH was not appealing?

It uses the phrases “lightweight virtual machine”, “work virtual machine” and “Disposable VMs” as well as “AppVMs” in the documentation. It is an interesting concept, along the lines of sandboxes, applets, chroots, LPARs, LVMs, etc. and similar trusted computing architectures that have been around for ages. In the Qubes model each application is meant to run in a virtual machine space so attacks find harder to escape. You can run a financial VM and a gaming VM, for example, that would be isolated in the same way as running a financial computer and a gaming computer.

I have run a similar setup for years. Not sure what would make anyone want to switch to a Qube. AFAIK no one has every accused Joanna Rutkowska of understatement in her marketing.

With that being said, her Invisible Things Lab’s blog announced today Qubes Alpha 2 released!

The Alpha 2 is out!
New screenshots are here :)

Exclamation! Exclamation! Can you believe that this virtually hyped sandbox will be any different than the many open source ones already available such as Nizza and the Nova microhypervisor?