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by vajrapani666 2939 days ago
My battery started failing on my 2016 Macbook Pro. I took it in and Apple said it would take 5 days to fix. I found a loaner macbook, but didn't want to setup a whole development environment to use for just a week. So I used Google Cloud Platform with an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop with remote access over chrome remote desktop. It was ungodly fast, and just for fun I cranked it up to 8 cores. It's nice to know that if anything ever happens to my physical laptop, I can just power up my cloud instance and keep working without skipping a beat.

Linux was fantastic, except for two things.

1. Sketch. All the competitors aren't even close to being up-to-par, and it's become an industry standard. 2. Docker and permissions. I can't believe it was so much harder to deal with docker in Linux than MacOSX. I constantly struggled with docker creating files as root. Even when I explicitly defined the $UID or $USER for docker-compose, I would still see the docker image that ran a Rails instance create files owned by root in `log` and `tmp`.

I highly recommend trying out Ubuntu in the cloud to give Linux a trial run, you might be surprised by what you love and hate.

1 comments

Here's the guide I used to setup a cloud desktop on GCP http://timbot-inc.blogspot.com/2015/11/cloud-workstation-how...