As developers we trust so many different libraries. And it is important that they are safe when used in production code.
But we shouldn't have to worry about accidentally installing a library which uploads our emails or our browser data. By working from a VM we can prevent that.
The worst a malicious library can do from a VM is upload our SSH keys or source code (which is still bad).
I'd much rather we solve the security problems using better local sandboxing for software, like how it works on our phones. That would help end users as well, and it would stop crypto ransomware and all sorts of other attacks. Or alternatively, run my dev tools from a solaris zone or a freebsd jail or something, both of which have no performance impact.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview
Virtualized Linux on x86 AND being able to run VSCode on your Mac for great fonts, WiFi, screen etc without having to fuss with drivers.
Of course ssh and tmux also work well for this purpose.
People are advocating remote development heavily, so there must be some *huge* benefit that I don't understand. So much so that people are willing to give up amazing features of an IDE. To get VSCode to a usable state requires 16 third-party plugins, and you're left with about 1/3 of JetBrains functionality, in which the features aren't quite as good. YMMV I guess?
However, JetBrains unfortunately has nothing coming close to the transparency and speed of the VSCode remote connection, with your source living only on the remote side.
In cases where being able to work on remote, for example very particular configurations, or docker containers, or WSL2, this makes a huge difference.
For me this is mostly Python and TypeScript these days, where VSCode has grown particularly strong in terms of IDE features.
VS Code Remote is a game changer. It's how IDEs should work. It allows you to run all the GUI chrome locally for responsive editing, while letting the remote do all the heavy lifting (including building, debugging, testing, and deploying). It finally overcomes the latency and other usability issues of using a wimpy local box to connect to a powerful remote box to write software.
I never used VS Code much and otherwise prefer JetBrains myself. But the remote development extension changed my workflow permanently, and I now recommend it to all my colleagues who develop cloud/data intensive code.
It's still beta so they have a lot of work to do.
Have you tried the Projector beta yet?
However, the 2012.1 releases now support running code on via WSL2 or SSH, which is closer to VS Code's setup. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2021/02/intellij-idea-2021-1...
Recently, I've settled for using my remote machine as the source of truth for my codebase (a monorepo) and only sync specific directories I work with locally.
Remote docker interpreter (python) + this is a workable-enough solution. It's not ideal - I still have to switch to the terminal to run git, tests, etc. Compared to this, the VSCode way is just simply better; especially if you don't use all the features of a full-blown IDE.
Benefits are more obvious on massive code bases that take a long time to build, test (or really just do anything).
IntelliJ will get stuck indexing forever and can be frustrating to use - having the code live on beefy servers that can run the computationally expensive bits faster can make a big difference.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/creating-a-remote-server-c...
Their old server config is just pointing to a repo I think, but isn’t remote dev.
I looked into this last year before their recent announcement and at the time they said it wasn’t on their roadmap, but looks like that thankfully changed.
You mean this literally? It took just that one plugin for me, when experimenting with using another machine on my network as the dev environment.
EDIT - child comment is right, the following paragraph is not true! I was writing from my phone and remembered installing this extension [0] but now that I've checked it is for counting offsets from the beginning of the file, not lines and columns. Which I'd concede is not so much of a basic functionality expected in any editor.
[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ramyarao...
And I mean *really* basic stuff... like a status bar label
that shows the line and column numbers where the cursor
is! Yes, you already need an extension just for that.Usually, the only plugins I need to install is the language server plugin for whatever language I'm using. At least, that works for Go and Python while Node and JS/TS work right out of the box.
for me, a TS using node nerd, vs code does these things well:
1. ts language server
2. decent plugins (that i can commit to scm)
3. yarn 2 support
4. nice debugger interaction
Off the top of my head, VSCode lacks a decent code formatter and a "search everywhere"-type command palette. And the Git and database support is not good either, but that's kind of a given.
Mixed scale DPI screens are not a problem if you use Wayland, which is basically the default now.
Font rendering though? YMMV.
I have a laptop running Ubuntu and connected to my 4k monitor in front of me. Has an Intel gpu. I do not even want to use multiple displays, I’m gonna go with the external only.
Wayland can do fractional scaling but then VsCode, Firefox, Discord and whatever apps I tried became blurry shit. Firefox has an environment variable to fix it. VsCode has an experimental build and command line flags. I have no idea about Discord. I don’t care if its the app developers fault. It is just plain bad.
X11 can do fractional scaling but fonts are a little blurry for some reason and I have the worst screen tearing I’ve ever seen in my life. It is unusable.
macOS and Windows do this perfectly. It is not something you think about. Windows has some weird looking apps here and there but the shittyneas is not even close.
For context, I have (currently) a precision 5520 laptop;
I run arch with sway, I have a big USB-C 4k at work and 2*16:10 FHD Dell USB-C monitors at home.
The only issues I have with linux is that I don't have Microsoft Office, and Zoom+Wayland is buggy as hell.
X11 apps do that. Firefox can run in Wayland mode, so run it in Wayland mode. vscode and other electron apps do not support wayland yet, so until they do (yes, they are taking their sweet time), you either need to run with integer scaling, or tolerate them being blurry.
In Windows, the shittyness is much worse. Basically any Qt app is unusable with hidpi in Windows.
In my experience, it isn’t. On my setup (200% + 100% screens, Retina MacBook Pro in Boot Camp) KeePassXC, qBitTorrent, Qt Designer all look great on both screens; VLC has slightly weird fonts on the HiDPI screen but still works fine.
Use the closest integer scaling and adjust default font sizes (and if needed other sizes like window title height or panel height).
It's also best if you just don't buy monitors that have dpis that are not close to integer multiples of 96.
Maybe I should try 2x gui scaling and 0.75 font size? Never occured to me that I could go below 1 on the scales, it might work.
edit: 2x on wayland is still blurry. 1x + 2x font works but as I said, tiny buttons and stuff.
Still, my point is; why the fuck am I dealing with this?
In mobile where there is market, Google did it.
I stopped trying a couple of years ago (after I got a 4K monitor) to convince myself that desktop Linux is workable.
Linux for desktop = console
Tangentially, I want to mention that the archlinux wiki is a terrific catalog of machines and their known quirks (and sometimes, fixes for the quirks!).
And thats sort of the theme everywhere. Its super fast and I love it, and its mostly stable and mostly great. But tiny bugs shine through all over. I've been totally spoiled by Apple's spit and polish.
For example, I get random graphics bugs after waking from sleep sometimes. Sometimes my mouse cursor is either invisible or for some reason duplicated, so I see a second stationary cursor hovering over my windows. And for some reason my second display doesn't vsync, so I get obvious tearing when I scroll or move windows around.
I use a trackpad, and smooth scrolling works properly in most apps. But Firefox needs an obscure XInput environment variable to make it work. (That trick is only mentioned deep some a bug tracker). Smooth scrolling doesn't work at all in IntelliJ. Intellij also doesn't let me use the Meta key (Cmd / Start) as a shortcut modifier - so my muscle memory for navigation is all messed up and I can't rebind keys to fix it. I hate how Ctrl+C is copy everywhere except the terminal, which needs me to Ctrl+Shift+C instead. Etc etc. Forever.
Its unbelievably responsive compared to my 2016 MBP though. If you haven't upgraded in awhile and you can afford it, its a fantastic time to get a new system. But linux on the desktop still isn't entirely pain free. Way better than it was a few years ago though.
...or use Wayland where smooth scrolling should work by default
In Fedora maybe. Not in most distros. And recall many apps have to run under xwayland for compatibility so all of those apps won't support scaling properly.
It's still not there yet.
Battery life also takes a huge hit on the Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks I've tried, even after trying to apply some tweaks (not that I should need to). For this reason I use Windows+WSL on laptops even though I'd prefer Ubuntu.
Docker on Mac has a lot of IO overhead. This is mentioned in the article:
> The way I made it work is by having a full “dev environment” running virtually. That means that I check out repositories on the virtual disk and run everything from there. This has the slight inconvenience that I can’t easily access those files with Finder, but the upside is that there is no noticeable IO latency issues like when running Docker for Mac.
If you just want improved performance with bind mounts instead, you can use :cached or :delegated flags.
I think Fusion comes with a driver for Docker
If so, why do you need rust compiler in the first place? May be you don't? May be it's wrong compiler?
It worked well, except that I occasionally want to run a container within my dev-environment. Running a container inside a container is possible, but not easy.
I settled on running a Vagrant Libvirt VM. I do not know what the performance impact is- but I have not noticed either my laptop or the VM being slow.
Do you know of a set of settings or tips to follow for making containers as safe as a VM?
A better solution would be a desktop OS with proper application sandboxing. Mac OS is taking many steps in that direction.
Linux - as usual - has a multitude of solutions, all of them problematic. (AppArmor, SeLinux, Firejail, Snap, Flatpak)
Many devs just blindly install things from npm, copy random snippets from GitHub gists, execute remote shell scripts via curl that they just copy and paste into the terminal because they read it in some blog post, and on and on.
Anyway, just my worthless < 2 cents.
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro...
Additionally, VMs might be a great help to complicated debugging. You can crash a VM without taking down your desktop. I'm not sure about things like kernel debugging, but it might be easier in a VM.
You can use your windows or Mac laptop with visual studio code to do web development. ng serve works as if you ran it from your laptop.
The biggest drawback I can think of is if you ever needed to leave the house. Thankfully, I have no life so I don't have this problem.
Add ZeroTier to the equation and as long as you have Internet connection when you're outside the house you'll probably not even notice it.
I just use ssh. SSH to a VPS and map 22 to a port on the VPS.
I have a really small VPS for this.
I think poking a hole on port 22 is mostly ok if you only allow key authentication and no password authentication but I don't know enough to give advice on security.
I use a VPS with SSH. I have to ssh in, then I can ssh into the machine at home.
For safety, key authentication and fail2ban would cover a lot. I mainly have the 1 port.
If I need to expose another SSH port to the internet, I can do it, but yes, it would need extra protection since logs are coming from the machine ssh'ing in.
Changing the port from the default 22 to something else is also recommended, if only because it makes fail2ban logs way less verbose.
Does it solve the security problem by preventing access to the majority of your home directory?
Or solve it by only allowing you to install vetted libraries?
I've been reluctant to contribute to nodejs (e.g. electron) projects for some time, because I just don't want to run npm on a computer with any kind of remotely private data.
Lately there were just too many itches to scratch, so I went for a VM replicating my normal setup (dotfiles etc.), and I just use x2go, locally. Quick and dirty setup which is good enough when used infrequently.
My ideal setup would probably be closer to https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk..., but it's more setup than I could be bothered with at the time. Maybe one day.
Are containers a hack that will go away as VMs become lightweight or will containers replace VMs?
I run proxmox, and when I first set things up I used VMs, but over time I moved most server kinds of things to containers.
EDIT: docker is a special thing - creating an entire environment from one Dockerfile is pretty powerful.
I ended up going with a VM, as it still allows (IIRC) the thin client to be thinner. There's definitely bits of containers I miss, like I'm back to keeping notes in a markdown file for commands that would be added to a Dockerfile, but I'm also not having to do weird things to get something like my shell history to persist.
We probably have a long ways to go before we get there and it does come with its own sets of challenges and usability quirks even if the technical implementation is good.
For example, 8 years ago I used to run Windows 7 with xubuntu running in a graphical vmware VM using Unity mode[0]. Basically a way to seamlessly run graphical Linux apps in Windows. Each GUI app you launched from the Linux VM would have its own floating window that you could move around like any other Windows window. As an aside, this feature has been removed from vmware for years now when it comes to Linux guests.
It worked well enough for then, and I spent 99% of my time in that VM (browser, code editor, everything) and I only used Windows for recording / editing videos and playing games to avoid having to dual boot.
But even with vmware's really good disk performance there were performance issues at times, you're also splitting your memory up between your main system and your VM, it's not that efficient. Then there's little quirks like your main OS not really fully being able to integrate with files and apps from the VM, so you have to do hacky things to get apps to launch from a taskbar, search doesn't work because your stuff is in a VM, etc.. Plus you always feel like you're split between 2 worlds, the main OS and the VM. It doesn't feel really nice and cohesive.
To a lesser extent nowadays we have WSL 2 on Windows which is what I use. It solves a lot of the VM problems from above and running an X-server lets you run graphical apps very well, but you still feel like you're running 2 operating systems and the user experience suffers because you don't feel like you're running 1 streamlined OS.
A prime example is having to put all of your files in WSL 2's file system to get good performance but having certain types of files there is an inconvenience or you may not want to do it because it doesn't make sense to put 100GB of storage files on your SSD. That happened to me because I have a podcast site which is mostly code, except for a ton of raw wav file recordings + mp3s. Instead of just having a git ignored directory in my project, I had to create a 2nd directory outside of WSL to store these files. There's many other examples like this too.
I don't know what the Mac story is like, but I would imagine at minimum you're dealing with files being split into 2 worlds and will experience the unfriendly split OS feeling overall. Does Parallels let you seamlessly run floating windows across your VM and macOS?
[0]: Here's a really old video of that set up https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-an-awesome-linux-devel...
> we have WSL 2 on Windows which is what I use
My new work laptop runs Windows, so I'm interested in WSL2. I gather that it has good integration with Windows (eg you can type notepad and notepad will open)- which is convenient but removes any security boundary.
> Does Parallels let you seamlessly run floating windows across your VM and macOS?
I don't use Parallels, or Mac. But I believe so- they call it Coherence https://kb.parallels.com/4670
I agree that not everything is as convenient. My papercuts were not being able to type `code .` to make a new VSCode window. And not being able to use the new tab shortcut in my terminal to make a new tab in the current directory.
I've made a little project to solve both those issues for me https://github.com/ccouzens/ssh-nicety It works, but is fairly bespoke to my setup. It uses Unix Domain sockets (which probably excludes Windows). The only new terminal it can launch atm is gnome-terminal.
If you decide to use it, I have another more up to date video with my whole WSL 2 / Docker / all the tools I use / etc. set up at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-linux-dev-environment-on-wi...