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Discussion on: Setting up a new dev machine

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deozza profile image
Edenn Touitou • Edited

I was so tired to set up dev environment because I was switching computers, changing os, ... that I now use remote workspace solutions.

Pick a server. Something light with 4g of ram and 64g of ssd should do the trick. Install on it docker and docker compose (to create tailored dev environment related to a dev project), portainer (to manage the containers), nginx-swag (to reverse proxy the containers to clean urls), micro (a cool text editor in the command line), fish (to have a better cli with autocompletion and stuff), and then your favorite editors. It could be code-studio, if you are a visual studio user. Or the whole jetbrains suite thanks to jetbrains projector (mind that 4g of ram might not be enough as jetbains IDE are resource black holes).

Now, you have the same dev environment accessible from anywhere, from any device. Laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet, xbox one x, you name it. As long as it has a wifi connection and a browser.

If you don't want to open source it and handle all of that yourself, you could use external solutions like gitpod.

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jmccabe profile image
John McCabe

Making sure to take account of relatively recent changes to Docker's licensing model :-)

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babib profile image
𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐢 ✨

That's interesting! Never thought of that...remote workspace solutions

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deozza profile image
Edenn Touitou

It's developping quite quickly recently. Thanks to covid and remote working. You can even build a whole remote workspace (and not only for development) with solutions like kasm. But it's more tailored towards big companies. There you will have a full ubuntu experience directly from the browser

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babib profile image
𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐢 ✨

Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Would definitely give it a try

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alesbe profile image
alesbe

Seems like a good solution! The experience is the same as using a local machine? You don't notice any delay or screen resolution issues?

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deozza profile image
Edenn Touitou

The experience is the same. From times to times, projector is a bit laggy because of how heavy it is compared to code-server. But otherwise, 99% of the time you won’t feel a difference

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

Intriguing!

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babib profile image
𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐢 ✨

Ikr

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leob profile image
leob

Yeah your coding environment completely "in the cloud" and accessible from anywhere with a thin/dumb terminal (can be almost anything - desktop, laptop, tablet, phone - although the last one is probably not very practical) - that's the holy grail ... doesn't VSCode already have a complete "spaces" solution for this?

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deozza profile image
Edenn Touitou

I think you are refering to coder.com ?

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leob profile image
leob

Hadn't heard about code.com, no I meant Gitbhub Codespaces github.com/features/codespaces

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deozza profile image
Edenn Touitou

Oh yeah. I haven't tried it yet, as it was (is still ?) in beta

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

Well that probably means it's free lol, so that's good :) ... if it would be alpha then I'd think twice (typically you're then constantly busy working around problems and issues), but most of the time "beta" means it's almost perfect :)