It took me like five minutes to parse what you were asking about "replicating" the cloud experience locally - the way you phrase it, you're inherently assuming

It took me like five minutes to parse what you were asking about "replicating" the cloud experience locally - the way you phrase it, you're inherently assuming that a local development environment would be superior in a few factors, none of which end up being so: - Speed: Local development environments are just as slow as cloud ones, when not slower (due to compositor hitches, background downloads, heavyweight UI toolkits, all that bullshit). Speed is part of the reason that I ditched local environments. I can't emphasize enough how little there is to be truly gained from offlining a workspace in terms of performance. When looking beyond pure ideal-world benchmarks and taking the intersecting outliers that impact performance during actual usage into play, the net savings, as I'm trying to convey here, are negative. - Security: The odds are greater that somebody's going to run a buffer overflow on one of the many undermaintained and/or proprietary services and applications running on your machine (when's the last time someone ran Valgrind against f.lux?) and slipstream a rootkit into it, than that somebody's going to attack your dev server with a zero-day against CentOS (and even if they did, you'd have been just as screwed anyway). Put another way: which machine is more secure, the one with a dedicated 24/7 threat response team monitoring port access, or the one that gets left unattended on a table at Starbucks every Tuesday afternoon? - Control: If your development needs more control than root access to the host filesystem, you're doing something wrong, and your codebase is going to be more fragile for it. (Hell, even using root access is a sign that you're being persnickety.) - Learning: Learning time should be allocated toward the systems involved in what I'm actually building, not a http://www.xkcd.com/1579/ http://www.xkcd.com/1579/ hodgepodge of perpetually-obsolete periphery. I don't know WTF you're talking about with my examples being Windows-oriented - the driver example I cited was specifically inspired by an issue with my desktop's network adapter on Linux.