> I think running your dev environment in a VM is the future on all platforms. We probably have a long ways to go before we get there and it does come with its

> I think running your dev environment in a VM is the future on all platforms. We probably have a long ways to go before we get there and it does come with its own sets of challenges and usability quirks even if the technical implementation is good. For example, 8 years ago I used to run Windows 7 with xubuntu running in a graphical vmware VM using Unity mode[0]. Basically a way to seamlessly run graphical Linux apps in Windows. Each GUI app you launched from the Linux VM would have its own floating window that you could move around like any other Windows window. As an aside, this feature has been removed from vmware for years now when it comes to Linux guests. It worked well enough for then, and I spent 99% of my time in that VM (browser, code editor, everything) and I only used Windows for recording / editing videos and playing games to avoid having to dual boot. But even with vmware's really good disk performance there were performance issues at times, you're also splitting your memory up between your main system and your VM, it's not that efficient. Then there's little quirks like your main OS not really fully being able to integrate with files and apps from the VM, so you have to do hacky things to get apps to launch from a taskbar, search doesn't work because your stuff is in a VM, etc.. Plus you always feel like you're split between 2 worlds, the main OS and the VM. It doesn't feel really nice and cohesive. To a lesser extent nowadays we have WSL 2 on Windows which is what I use. It solves a lot of the VM problems from above and running an X-server lets you run graphical apps very well, but you still feel like you're running 2 operating systems and the user experience suffers because you don't feel like you're running 1 streamlined OS. A prime example is having to put all of your files in WSL 2's file system to get good performance but having certain types of files there is an inconvenience or you may not want to do it because it doesn't make sense to put 100GB of storage files on your SSD. That happened to me because I have a podcast site which is mostly code, except for a ton of raw wav file recordings + mp3s. Instead of just having a git ignored directory in my project, I had to create a 2nd directory outside of WSL to store these files. There's many other examples like this too. I don't know what the Mac story is like, but I would imagine at minimum you're dealing with files being split into 2 worlds and will experience the unfriendly split OS feeling overall. Does Parallels let you seamlessly run floating windows across your VM and macOS? [0]: Here's a really old video of that set up https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-an-awesome-linux-development-environment-in-windows-with-vmware https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-an-awesome-linux-devel...