The real question is…. WHY DOES AZURE DEVOPS STILL EXIST?!?!?

Personally, I use the very technical method of listening for the buzzer to go off…

I hate that everything has WiFi for no reason…

“Kirk to Enterprise…”

That’s kind of what the ublue project is doing. Bazzite is a part of that, of course. But it also has more “normal” versions like Bluefin (gnome) and Aurora (plasma).

You know all those Cyberpunk books and movies?

Apparently we thought those were a suggestion instead of a warning…

Amen

Yes! This what I usually do. I will develop on the host using tools installed via Homebrew, then package/build/test via docker.

And to be clear, I really love the ideas behind Bluefin and use it every day. I’ve just kind of given up on devcontainers, specifically.

Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.

They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.

Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).

And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…

Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.

They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.

Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.

I the context of Linux and self-hosting “prepping” is usually more about maintaining services you find useful in a way that you can do it yourself, as opposed to relying on Google or Amazon (etc) who could pull the rug out from under you at basically any time.

Hmmm, interesting. I like brew, for sure. And devcontainers worked ok for me when I was working on something by myself.

But as soon as I started working on a side project with a friend, who uses Ubuntu and was not trying to develop inside a container, things got more complicated and I decided to just use brew instead. I’m sure I could have figured it out, but we are both working full time and have families and are just doing this for fun. I didn’t want to hold us up!

Our little project’s back end runs in a docker compose with a Postgres instance. It’s no problem to run it like that for testing.

Maybe a re-read of the documentation for devcontainers would help…

Personally, I have found the developer experience on Bluefin-dx (the only one I’ve tried…) to be…. mixed.

VSCode + Devcontainers, which are the recommended path, are pretty fiddly. I have spent as much time trying to get them to behave themselves as I have actually writing code.

Personally, I’ve resorted to using Homebrew to install dev tools. The CLI tools it installs are sandboxed to the user’s home directory and they have everything.

It’s not containers - I deploy stuff in containers all the time. But, at least right now, the tooling to actually develop inside containers is kind of awkward. Or at least that’s been my experience so far.

I think the ublue project is fantastic and I really like what they are doing. But most of the world of developer tooling just isn’t there yet. Everything you can think of has instructions on how to get it going in Ubuntu in a traditional installation. We just aren’t there yet with things like Devcontainers.

Yes, though traditional point-and-click GUI apps will also be rendered according to the same rules.

However, a lot of fans of tiling window managers also use things like terminal-based file mangers, have relatively well developed Neovim configs, etc.

So, it’s kind a whole THING that some folks really enjoy.

Veronica is awesome and deserves a bigger following, no doubt.

I use Aurora (the KDE version) as a software dev/ gaming machine. It’s great!

Yeah, I do all my development in WSL2 (Ubuntu) at work every day. I use VSCode on the Windows 11 host. It’s great!

Would I prefer to use Linux natively? Sure, but I also have to support some Windows-only legacy code and a D365 environment or two, so Windows makes sense.

Came here to upvote for the exact same reasons.

I always run GE at this point.

Yeah, ujust is pretty cool!

At work, we’re a Windows shop. So mostly Docker (desktop) via WSL2. But it depends on the project. Sometimes it’s just NodeJS in Windows itself!

At home, mostly tools like nvm and Python venvs to handle multiple projects with potentially overlapping/problematic dependencies that I want to isolate from the base system.

Either way, initial testing happens locally with Docker compose, sometimes minikube depending on the project.

With Bluefin-DX it’s a lot of the same concepts but the included tools get you there a different, and honestly easier and more convenient way. But I have learn how to use those tools!

Bluefin-DX is great! I’m still figuring out how everything works - there are a lot of tools included that are new to me, despite being a cloud-oriented developer.

It’s a very different way to use Linux, from how the OS is constructed, to the container-first nature of the default applications and intended workflow. But I’m really enjoying learning how to use it.