alt Hacker NewsQubes OS uses the Linux kernel. Without wanting to start a flame-war and with all respect to Linux, it’s not even close. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD_security_features
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(This site is extremely good and has fairly recent coverage, point-by-point, of all OpenBSD's mitigations. An important subtext to take to this is that OpenBSD has a reputation for introducing mitigations that exploit developers make fun of. Some of them are great, some of them less so.)
You misunderstand the Qubes' approach to security. You isolate your workflows into separate VMs, so that security of a single VM doesn't matter. For example, my secrets are stored in a dedicated offline VM. All kernel bugs in it are just not exploitable. I open my online banking in a dedicated VM, in which nothing else is ever opened. Which attack vector do you think can be used against that?
The “kernel” in Qubes is arguably Xen rather than Linux, and that’s where the security boundaries are supposed to be defined rather than within VMs that may be running any OS. VM compartmentalization as a security mechanism is hard to compare to a more conventional Unix like OpenBSD.