Ask HN: How many people use virtual computers to manage their lives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many people use virtual computers to manage their lives?

2 pointshighwayman475 comments

For example, say you (1) work remotely, (2) have a side hustle and then (3) everything else. You could have 1 default computer and 2 virtual instances to keep things organized.

Curious if anyone does this and if so, and best practices.

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Not exactly what you're asking, but I have a dedicated VM for handling financial stuff and financial stuff only. Banking, bill pay, investments, accounting. Keeps things separate from my work/play environments; less risk of picking up something nasty that harvests those creds. And it's easy to take a snapshot and back it up for a quick restore. For $REASONS I've used the free VMWare ESXi license for this for years. I briefly tried to have a separate VM for on-line shopping, but that ended up being too much friction, particularly for the rest of the family.

Being able to spool up a VM quickly from a template is also nice to constrain the blast radius of those "this is probably a bad idea, but..." experiments.

When I was doing more consulting, I would usually have a per-client VM, at least to handle client communications, client access and document/deliverable prep. Heavy lifting was usually done on shared infrastructure, but it made life a lot easier to have that separation.

If you have a side-hustle going, I'd definitely want to avoid co-mingling that with anything else (esp real-work stuff).

That’s a good idea regarding a financial VM!

Yeah I use Virtualbox to bucket different activities and help keep things organized. My main OS is Linux, so if I need to use Windows for things like Word, or iTunes, then I use a specialized VM for that. Another VM is a toy machine for trying out different Windows software, and it's configured not to talk to The Internet since I test a lot of software that could have malware / phone home etc

Also: Windows software that isn't digitally signed and could be doing anything it likes. I have a few other VMs mostly for coding and dev stuff. Github Desktop has no Linux version, so I have a dedicated Windows 10 VM for that. And a few Fedora VMs for casual surfing of the web & social media like Hackernews, Reddit etc

Amazing, really.

Check out Qubes for an extreme example of this:

https://www.qubes-os.org/

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