> Plopping an entire VM into a zipfile and saying "here's your software" felt like lazy engineering to many of us at the time (and still today). I've seen this

> Plopping an entire VM into a zipfile and saying "here's your software" felt like lazy engineering to many of us at the time (and still today). I've seen this (a long time ago) in the education world market. Very small school with a STEM program. They had specific scientific software they wanted undergrads to use (and some of it was pretty proprietary and used to interface with lab equipment) + a pre-configured IDE. Instead of going through the compatibility matrix of OS and their versions they just gave all students a VM image that would "just work". Everyone could bring in their own devices and as long as you could run an hypervisor everything would "just work".