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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Could you just install a full-fat Linux desktop VM on your Windows workstation and live in it?

I use Ubuntu inside Virtualbox at work, but it has caused almost everyone on my team issues at some point - the whole thing freezing and needing to be restarted, very laggy GUI (scrolling in VS Code gets ugly), network connectivity issues when switching WiFi hotspots (also doesn't work with Starbucks), running out of hard disk space if you didn't allocate enough to begin with, to name a few. Sure, there are always workarounds, but the time and productivity it has costed my team would have easily justified getting a Mac, which IT thinks is too expensive :shrug:.

First, VirtualBox's performance has never been great, you'd want to use something like VMware.

Second, why use a cross platform app inside VM? Using the VM only for command line interface through SSH will get rid of any lag. You can share the host OS file system inside the VM and use GUI app on the host OS against native file system and you won't have to worry about filling up VM disk.

Connecting some $1k MacBook Air to an external monitor + keyboard would get you a decent desktop experience which you can even take it out. Not sure how that is any expensive.

VMWare or Hyper-V should perform better... though, why not go headless and just mount your linux filesystem in Windows, or vice-versa over a local network share, and edit in windows, run in an ssh prompt? That's how I've done it in the past... lately I've just gotten used to the windows-isms in git bash and Docker Desktop... looking forward to the WSL2 based release though.

That's basically what VSCode does, except without all the setup hassle [0].

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview

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