[theK]

I spent more than a year living with the numerous downsides of high level CDE (containerized development environment) tools. I must admit that I am very skeptical about all options available right now and that I have rolled back to using plain, old school, docker compose based CDE.

Both .devcontainers and .devfile managed to create more effort than they took away. Some key points:

- long lived containers

- abstracting away the fact that you run stuff inside containers in the IDE and abstracting away the container life cycle

- cryptic error states and error messages, especially when setting up new projects from scratch. This often boiled down to bad plugins (even Microsoft's own VSCode plugins wet the bed often)

- only superficial support for podman

- bad support for arm based HW (and arch translation issues, like a tool requesting arm containers but the host running docker is x64)

At this point I consult teams to try out a plain compose.yml as a CDE and skip the "enterprise" stuff.

[WhatIsDukkha]

This seems to be podman focused from what I see.

[theK]

No, not really. A big part of the problem is half baked software on the client side.

For devcontainers even the reference implementation CLI is significantly incomplete.

[WhatIsDukkha]

https://happihacking.com/blog/posts/2023/dev-containers-emac...

Looks pretty useable to me...

[theK]

You still cannot stop, remove or update a Dev container from CLI and there at numerous issues with the rest of the implemented features.

[0]: https://github.com/devcontainers/cli?tab=readme-ov-file#cont...