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Comment by ademup | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see so many people using containers when setting up a KVM is so easy, gives the most robust environment possible, and to my knowledge much has better isolation. A vanilla build of Linux plus your IDE of choice and you're off to the races.

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You often don't need strong isolation. The sandboxing is more to avoid model accidents than a Skynet scenario.

Not everyone has spare hardware lying around!

For sure! But just for reference, I'm on a mid-tier 2022 Dell Inspiron laptop: Ryzen 7 5825U with 64GB ram and 500GB SSD.

On it, I run Ubuntu 24.04 as my host, and my guest is Lubuntu with 16GB ram and 80GB ssd for my KVM.

I almost always have 2 instances of PHPstorm open in both Host and and Guest with multiple terminal tabs running various agentic tasks.

64 GB. Say no more :)

I lived with 16GB until last year and upgraded to 32 only this year, which I thought was a huge improvement. I suspect a lot of people are around this ballpark, especially if they have bought Macs. Mine is Linux, still. So containers are the “simpler” versions.

...wait, you and I are using "KVM" in different ways, then. To me, it means a switch that lets you use the same Keyboard, Monitor ("Video"), and Mouse for two different machines. Sounds like you're talking instead about a technique for running a VM on a single machine - which, from Googlin', I suspect is "Kernel-based Virtual Machine", a new-to-me term. Thanks for teaching me something!

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