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Best Linux/Virtual Dev Setup In Windows?


Gazley
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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! :)

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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. 

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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!

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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

 

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