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Comment by themckman | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment to how nice or awful running some sort of Linux VM (maybe under Hyper-V) and using Putty to SSH to it for development on Windows would be? This work is promising, but doesn't appear "quite there", yet. I run OSX now, but don't really ever develop directly on the machine and am mostly SSH'ed to Linux hosts for development.

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I'm using a combination of Ubuntu Server 16.04 VM (4GB RAM, 2-cores, 80GB HDD) + Virtualbox + MobaXterm (best SSH client on Windows). It works beautifully. I previously used Putty but it's a bit sparse regarding some options and gets confused sometimes when sending key codes via SSH session. Also I get the option of either using the Vbox shared folders or using the included SFTP client in MobaXterm that follows the current folder you're currently located in the terminal. It's a simple drag and drop. It even has a XServer included so I can run Linux desktop apps on Windows.

I got tired of running Linux directly on my desktop. Compiz crashes (worked in 14.04, not working in 14.10, started working again in 15.04, not working in 15.10...), can't keep my select sound output, terrible font rendering, awful HiDPI support, graphics drivers are a mess, and on and on...

Since I basically just need the non-graphical parts of Linux (Bash + Tmux + Vim) I'm very happy with this setup.

PS: Forgot to say that I have a very beefy machine (Skylake Core i7 4Ghz, 32GB DDR4, fastest consumer NVMe SSD from Samsung) but I've found that this setup works well on basically any machine.

It works not bad, and I did it for some time. The biggest pain points are the lack of integration with the file system (I always forget how to set up shared folders) and that it can be hard to set up a decent ssh client. I use Cygwin ssh and mintty, and then ssh into the VM or external machines. Also there are the usual performance and space issues of VMs.

For this use case, "Ubuntu on Windows" seems to be a nice improvement.

Hyper-V can work well. I use it very frequently on my Surface Pro 2 with Win10. Currently I'm running FreeBSD 10.3, though in the past I've had Linux distros running in Hyper-V and that was good too.

It's a very convenient arrangement for developing web apps/servers. I have the servers running on FBSD which can be accessed from a browser on the Windows host. This perfectly replicates connecting to a remote server, so when the app is working properly and committed to the repo on the remote host, it's almost guaranteed to work as intended!

When I acquired the SP2 I originally thought I'd dual boot. Turns out that's difficult to accomplish, but in a way using Hyper-V is better because I have Windows and FBSD running at the same time. Of course the VM imposes limits so not optimum for every purpose but good enough for my uses.

I should mention that Cygwin is installed as well. Runs Bash nicely in a terminal, and a good way to ssh to remote servers as well as FBSD in Hyper-V.

Our team uses a Vagrant box (on VirtualBox) as a development server. Getting it to run on Windows requires a couple extra steps compared to OSX, but it's not too bad. You will probably want to use an alternative to the VirtualBox filesystem sharing though, as it's extremely slow. We use a combination of rsync (installed on Windows via cygwin) and NFS (using this plugin for Windows: https://github.com/winnfsd/vagrant-winnfsd).

msysGit is also handy when using a Windows host.

Rsync is straightforward and has fewer permissions issues to work out when sharing with Windows, but is uni-directional. NFS is a true share rather than a sync, but restricts what you can do to the directories on the guest in terms of permissions. There are other options too, like bindfs and unison, but I haven't personally explored those in depth.

It works amazingly well. Vagrant helps a lot setting everything up. I even used several VM instances at the same time trying to mimic microservices running in different servers. I edited all the files in my fave IDE running in Windows, a file change would trigger an automatic server restart on the affected service/VM. Debug worked just fine as did mobile debug using Vagrant Share. It's my workflow for web stuff.

I sound like a Vagrant fanboy or shareholder but I'm just a very happy dev since I started using this setup.

https://www.vagrantup.com/

Yep. I've setup Vagrant for my development server environments, and I use the vagrant-digitalocean plugin to deploy to DO. It's easy and convenient (though my host system is also Ubuntu).

I did this for 2013 - used Windows 7 because of the Toshiba brightness bug in Linux (until Windows rot annoyed me more). I started on PuTTY but rapidly switched to Cygwin and ssh.

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