[theduemmer]

I work in industrial controls and I have probably at least a dozen different VMs for all of the various programming softwares (each brand of PLC generally has their own proprietary software stack) and versions. Some of these things really don't play nice together and have the tendency to "blow up" now and again, where the whole OS needs to be nuked and reinstalled from scratch. Some programs are a nightmare to get working right and it's nice to be able to share working VMs with my coworkers.

IT also can't get their grubby fingers on the software inside and break anything. I also don't even have admin rights to change my network settings on my host OS, which is 100% required for the job as I need to connect to machine networks running a static IP. With VMs, I can get a USB Ethernet dongle and give it to the VM and get network control that way.

These days I do almost nothing on my host OS.