Gazley Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 Hey, I've been working on my old iMac for years and it's finally given up. It seems that Windows 10 PCs offer much better value and that is what I will probably end up with. However, I just wondered whether any of you are using a "canned" virtual environment on Windows that allows me to use Linux throughout the development process and then simply deploy to the Linux server? Really interested to hear what other PW devs on Windows are doing. Cheers!
apeisa Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 Are you talking about this? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about 2
applab Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 I'm a Linux guy end-to-end, but if I had to develop on a Windows machine my go-to solution would be to use https://www.virtualbox.org/ to setup a local Linux dev environment. I've also had a tinker with https://www.docker.com/ which looks like "the right way to go" but I don't it well enough yet. 1
Sergio Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 4 hours ago, Gazley said: Hey, I've been working on my old iMac for years and it's finally given up. It seems that Windows 10 PCs offer much better value and that is what I will probably end up with. My main 2011 15" Macbook Pro had serious graphic problems and stopped working couple weeks ago and I decided to build a Windows machine for the same reason. I also have a 13" that I use to travel. Here in Brazil, a Macbook Pro cost is outrageous, a powerful Mac setup can cost up to 3 or 4 months of salary of an experienced developer. A default 15" Macbook Pro costs here R$ 18.499,00 which converts to US$ 5,581.00!!! So, after 10 years of using only Macs, I built a PC that cost me about $1,700 and it's a beast of a machine for developing and video editing (and some games): Processor: Ryzen 7 1700 - Octa core, 3GHz RAM: 16GB 2133 MHz Motherboard: Gigabyte B350 Gaming 3 HD/SSD: 1 Kingston 250 GB SSD + 1 Western Digital 1TB 7200 rpm GPU: Asus Radeon RX 460 - 2GB RAM Monitor, keyboard, and mouse I already had. They cost about US$270 together. I installed Ubuntu through Windows WSL but I'm not using it like I thought I would. I installed Laragon and it works perfectly for running ProcessWire and other PHP projects. Windows 10 Pro is a very good OS, but I miss some good software like SequelPro and Transmit. The Windows equivalents are not as polished. 4
pwired Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 I use vmplayer, nowadays called workstation player. Free for home use and 166 euro for a commercial licence. It is by far superior to virtual box in so many ways. Have a look here: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/12_0 1
Jonathan Lahijani Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 +1 for WSL. It works wonderfully and has a lot of resources behind it. Getting better all the time. 2
Gazley Posted June 27, 2017 Author Posted June 27, 2017 Thanks guys for the many great suggestions! @Sérgio Jardim Laragon looks pretty cool. @apeisa @Jonathan Lahijani as does WSL. @pwired how do you get over not being able to create snapshots in vmplayer? Can you manually copy the VMs if you want different versions of the same VM? @applab Docker looks interesting. I didn't get the full picture but I assume you can just create containers containing apps (PW Sites) and then copy the container to a Linux server running Docker that can execute whatever is in the copied container? Wonder what kind of performance hit that would give you as opposed to running directly on the server? Cheers!
applab Posted June 27, 2017 Posted June 27, 2017 I'm still at the shallow end of the learning curve with Docker so I can't answer from experience but, AIUI... Yes, build a Docker image locally for your app/site and it should run seamlessly on any Docker-supporting host, which includes things like AWS. Regarding performance, according to this IBM research paper "The general result is that Docker is nearly identical to Native performance and faster than KVM in every category"http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/papers/0929052195DD819C85257D2300681E7B/$File/rc25482.pdf Just found this, it looks like others have made more progress
bernhard Posted April 26, 2019 Posted April 26, 2019 Sorry for hijacking this thread, but it could also be an intersting topic for you guys as it is a different approach that we could use for our development on Windows (and I'd need help to make it work):
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