Hi Randy,
I did consider Vagrant but there are a few issues with it:
- There is no GUI for it that I can find. I just like GUIs, especially for this sort of
work that I might do for a stretch at a time and then not have to do for months afterwards
and have to relearn next time.
- I have had - I have been told coincidentally and with just terrible luck - horrible
experiences with vagrant. The very first time I tried to use it, there was some kind of
bug with the kernel support for it - I don't remember the details - but it amounted to
a race condition that with my particular hardware somehow always resulted in a crashing
and unworkable environment that ended up eating 2 full workdays to debug. It pretty much
sucked. The other experience I've had with it is at a couple of hackfests at
conferences, where it involved downloading large files the wifi couldn't handle and
passing around USB keys, taking 30 min or more to get the base environment running, and it
eating up disk space and generally making my system run slow for weeks afterwards (I think
someone trying to help me get it working at one point set it to start on boot which I
didn't realize until weeks later after frequently losing my desktop stability to OOM
killing.)
- My use case here is I have a big beefy workstation, and a few different laptops. I
don't want to have to set the environment up multiple times or be moving large files
around. I just want to set up the environment once, and be able to ssh into it from
wherever. I'm not too worried about damage bc I can clone the VM once I have
everything working and setup, and everything else should be in git anyway.
Does that make sense or am I trying to fit a square peg in a round hole here?
Cheers,
~m