The current infrastructure engineering job and my focus on preparing people for such jobs me really rethinking about how modern virtualization and containerization has radically changed the best approach to getting a workstation setup and configured quickly, and being able to reconfigure just as quickly when needed. The relevant modern technologies include:
💭 Let me say that we are automatically discounting any remote (usually web based) workstation solutions since they create a critical dependency on an Internet connection that not only consistently works, but has very low lag.
Since you can create terminal workspaces in both virtual machines and simple containers the first important question …
If you are doing simple development, or even light-weight Kubernetes testing you can get away with just having a container engine (like Docker). But there’s a catch. And container engine requires a virtual machine in which to run. People don’t realize this at first, but that is exactly what Docker Desktop (or Rancher Desktop) installs. Since Docker Desktop is 100% proprietary (with some companies prohibiting it) and Rancher Desktop is still very buggy 1.0 software this leaves no other possibility for many people.
The best way to get work done in 2022 seems to be install a headless VirtualBox VM running your preferred Linux server image and ssh into it providing a local “cloud”-like server on your desktop. Then, install your preferred container engine without problem since, after all, these things love a good Linux server to run. You can even experiment with different container engine and Linux distro combinations, which you cannot do with just installing stuff into the host OS. Having a VM approach, therefore, seems like a no-brainer for everyone in tech.
dot repo with install directory for custom installs