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Comment by tobych | Hacker News Reader

Do people really do this on the native OS on a Mac? I use Macs for all my work, but we deploy to Linux, so that's what runs in all the VMs I run on my Mac. Currently I even use Eclipse in an Ubuntu VM to do the work. I wouldn't know how to install a package on my Mac if I tried, and given that all the production machines run on Linux, I've never seen the need.

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It sounds like you're in the minority based on places I've worked and people I've met! Good for you though, I think it requires a lot of discipline to stay on top of VMs which is why so many people install things directly to OS X.

Huh? Using VMs is a very widespread practice, on the last 2-3 years. Maybe not in enterprise America, but for startups and modern software/web companies/devs, it's all the rage.

Hence projects like Vagrant too.

And not only on Mac: it's better to use a VM for development if you're deploying to Linux even if you run Linux on your desktop too.

Why would you clutter your desktop install with a deployment environment stuff that could even be incompatible between your different projects?

(And of course it makes even more sense if you work on Windows but deploy to Linux).

Those are all great points. These days there are great tools like(foreman from heroku comes to mind) that give you tiny configuration files to detect which versions of languages and environment variables you need to make an application run so switching between applications is actually quite seamless. I work in mostly higher level languages so maybe things aren't as delicate.

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