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by beefbroccoli 1861 days ago
If you want to remove a lot of unnecessary pain in your life, completely abandon the idea of mounting a host FS within a guest VM. Doubly so if they're different OS's/FS's and triply so if this a development VM.
2 comments

Oh, I have.

My setup is now Remote VS Code to a Linux NUC that sits on my desk. All code lives on the NUC and all tests run on the NUC, but I can use my MacBook Pro as I move around the house, work outside, etc.

It's pretty seamless, I'm impressed.

Oh what… by "Remote VS Code" are you referring to this? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview Seems very handy indeed!
Yeah, the VSCode UI runs on my Mac, but it runs a vscode remote server on my NUC. Debugger, tests, etc. all run on my remote machine.

I originally did this in a Linux VM, but got tired of the battery hit that running a VM 24/7 has.

Neato, that's pretty awesome! Can keep your main machine freed up to deal with actual editing and other usage, while the remote server does all the "heavy lifting". Thanks for the info!
I have had a similar setup with a remote server and a MacBook Air. If internet on trains were a bit more stable it would have been the perfect setup.
Thank you for commenting about this! I've been looking for a good solution to this exact kind of thing.
I’ve had some success with Mutagen’s [0] Docker support. Essentially you can set up a tiny Alpine container or similar with a volume mounted to it. Mutagen will then keep your code in sync using rsync, allowing you to mount that volume in other containers and bypass the performance hit.

It’s a bit of a pain to set up, and you lose some of the advantages of using Docker in the first place, but if you absolutely have to use it, it can get you back to full performance.

[0] https://mutagen.io/