Ask HN: You like to work in a virtual development environment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: You like to work in a virtual development environment?

3 pointsMihaiSandor4 comments

You like to use a virtual machine directly in browser to work for a company? If so, what”s the advatanges? If no, what”s the downsides?

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Yes absolutely. Jupyter Notebooks are a classic example of success in this space. Many Data Scientists use Jupyter over the browser for day to day work. Including me.

Advantages: Allows you to use server resources than be limited by your laptop compute capabilities. Log in anywhere, means I don't have to carry my laptop around. As long as I have a browser, I get the same environment to work. Mental peace that my work and data are always safe. I can drop my laptop in a swimming pool and yet I will not even lose the last character I typed on that presentation I was making.

Disadvantages: Yeah, I cannot access my system while on an aeroplane. Can't think of anything else honestly, unless you live in a zone where the internet is as bad as on aeroplanes.

All in all, prefer the browser-based virtual machine any day. The advantages outweigh the single disadvantage of the need for a stable internet connection.

Counterpoint: I love being offline without a flaky VPN connection or whatever holding me back. That's not even going into things like latency, which can be an issue in many implementations (VS Code and the like have made big improvements in this regard, although).

I do all my development on a local machine. I have yet to find a virtual environment that is faster, with lower latency than a good desktop with multiple screens. Even the best internet connection is slower than a local machine. Most virtual environments are effectively sharing a single hardware resource amongst multiple users. None of that is an advantage in my view.

It depends how easy the setup is. If it means I don't have to spend a fuck load of time setting up and debugging the dev environment on a local machine then I wouldn't mind trying it out.

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