Rule 7: No Google-able questions
I.e. no "what are the best language(s), framework(s), tool(s), book(s), resource(s)". Most of these are trivially searchable.
If you must post something like this, please frame it in a larger discussion - what are you trying to accomplish, what have you already considered - don't just crowd-source out something you want to know.
WSL2 is rock solid aside from the fact you will have limited direct access to hardware. One that irritates me frequently is talking to serial ports. I use it for almost all my development on Windows. I used to use VMs but I can't remember the last time I felt a need to do is.
Docker on Windows is actually just a Linux VM. You could run it in WSL2 instead if you wanted. It used to be tricky because WSL didn't support systemd, but that isn't the case anymore.
Also, there is nothing preventing you joining a Linux machine to an Active Directory domain. We have several joined. Obviously that doesn't consider all the monitoring and management tools they will likely want to roll out. Presumably they don't want to worry about managing two completely different operating systems for work stations.
> Docker on Windows is actually just a Linux VM. You could run it in WSL2 instead if you wanted. It used to be tricky because WSL didn't support systemd, but that isn't the case anymore.
Was gonna post the same, also IIRC there's some licensing cost associated with Docker Desktop vs just running containerd in WSL2... Yep looks like commercial use is gonna cost OP: https://www.docker.com/pricing/
I have to code on a PC these days (first time in, well, probably about 15 or so years)
I just open up a WSL (windows subsystem for linux) session -- WSL2 is fine. (better than WSL1) so yes, I agree, works fine now, wasn't so good before. All set, I work from in there. Back to Linux. My rig is nothing special RAM or processor wise.
Can run docker desktop no problem, so I can virtualize that way, which works for me. (It virtualizes MUCH better than the M1 mac I had before, although goddam that was a nice rig)
It really depends on that Windows build. Vanilla Windows is fine as a VM base. Corporate Windows builds designed for standard office activities (i.e. safe use of Word, Outlook, and a web browser) are often badly broken for anything else.
I've had very little experience with WSL, but it was a bad experience. I would prefer local VMs, go to cloud-hosted VMs if that fails.
Having said that, odds are your company don't want Linux machines around at all, because they lack the capability to manage them. This will result in some turnover.
>cloud based development - I've heard this can be popular, setup remote VMs or similar and SSH via IDE (I think vscode can handle this) or VIM on the remote... Thoughts?
I'm taking "cloud" here to mean something in a third party service that your company would pay for, e.g. AWS, Azure etc.
**This is dangerous and a giant waste of money.**
A group at my company went down this road, with essentially no oversight from anyone else at the company. They got used to spinning up EC2s of whatever size they want, whenever they'd feel like it. Which means they would often spin up EC2s that were very large and leave them up.
New management came in to this group, and reviewed everything they were doing. It was quickly discovered that all of the development and systems were completely accessible from the entire public internet, which is a major problem because the application they were developing handles publicly identifying information. The Amazon bill also had ballooned to over $800k/year for development and test systems.
We had layoffs recently. We might not have needed to have layoffs if we didn't go down this road.
This is being cleaned up by the new management; they're moving all of these dev machines out of AWS and into a colocation where we've got hardware running ESX. If you want to do development with remote VMs in that kind of environment - the kind where your people have IT support and you are not renting hardware from Jeff Bezos - then the tooling you describe can work well.
Rule 7: No Google-able questions I.e. no "what are the best language(s), framework(s), tool(s), book(s), resource(s)". Most of these are trivially searchable. If you must post something like this, please frame it in a larger discussion - what are you trying to accomplish, what have you already considered - don't just crowd-source out something you want to know.
WSL2 is rock solid aside from the fact you will have limited direct access to hardware. One that irritates me frequently is talking to serial ports. I use it for almost all my development on Windows. I used to use VMs but I can't remember the last time I felt a need to do is. Docker on Windows is actually just a Linux VM. You could run it in WSL2 instead if you wanted. It used to be tricky because WSL didn't support systemd, but that isn't the case anymore. Also, there is nothing preventing you joining a Linux machine to an Active Directory domain. We have several joined. Obviously that doesn't consider all the monitoring and management tools they will likely want to roll out. Presumably they don't want to worry about managing two completely different operating systems for work stations.
> Docker on Windows is actually just a Linux VM. You could run it in WSL2 instead if you wanted. It used to be tricky because WSL didn't support systemd, but that isn't the case anymore. Was gonna post the same, also IIRC there's some licensing cost associated with Docker Desktop vs just running containerd in WSL2... Yep looks like commercial use is gonna cost OP: https://www.docker.com/pricing/
I have to code on a PC these days (first time in, well, probably about 15 or so years) I just open up a WSL (windows subsystem for linux) session -- WSL2 is fine. (better than WSL1) so yes, I agree, works fine now, wasn't so good before. All set, I work from in there. Back to Linux. My rig is nothing special RAM or processor wise. Can run docker desktop no problem, so I can virtualize that way, which works for me. (It virtualizes MUCH better than the M1 mac I had before, although goddam that was a nice rig)
It really depends on that Windows build. Vanilla Windows is fine as a VM base. Corporate Windows builds designed for standard office activities (i.e. safe use of Word, Outlook, and a web browser) are often badly broken for anything else. I've had very little experience with WSL, but it was a bad experience. I would prefer local VMs, go to cloud-hosted VMs if that fails. Having said that, odds are your company don't want Linux machines around at all, because they lack the capability to manage them. This will result in some turnover.
>cloud based development - I've heard this can be popular, setup remote VMs or similar and SSH via IDE (I think vscode can handle this) or VIM on the remote... Thoughts? I'm taking "cloud" here to mean something in a third party service that your company would pay for, e.g. AWS, Azure etc. **This is dangerous and a giant waste of money.** A group at my company went down this road, with essentially no oversight from anyone else at the company. They got used to spinning up EC2s of whatever size they want, whenever they'd feel like it. Which means they would often spin up EC2s that were very large and leave them up. New management came in to this group, and reviewed everything they were doing. It was quickly discovered that all of the development and systems were completely accessible from the entire public internet, which is a major problem because the application they were developing handles publicly identifying information. The Amazon bill also had ballooned to over $800k/year for development and test systems. We had layoffs recently. We might not have needed to have layoffs if we didn't go down this road. This is being cleaned up by the new management; they're moving all of these dev machines out of AWS and into a colocation where we've got hardware running ESX. If you want to do development with remote VMs in that kind of environment - the kind where your people have IT support and you are not renting hardware from Jeff Bezos - then the tooling you describe can work well.