> having to explicitly start/stop the VM, SSH into it, set up port forwarding, figure out a core count & RAM size which is large enough to be useful yet small e

> having to explicitly start/stop the VM, SSH into it, set up port forwarding, figure out a core count & RAM size which is large enough to be useful yet small enough to work on everyone's machine, having to set up rsync wrappers because the NFS host mount is unusably slow... All this is still kind of true for Docker on any other platform than Linux. There’s still a VM behind the scenes, and you still have to configure and manage it. However, I personally do avoid that — when I use Docker “on” macOS, I skip the hassle of actually running the Docker daemon locally, by instead having a little headless Linux mini-PC that exposes the Docker control socket over Tailscale to me, and configuring my local Docker client to connect to it. This not only gets `docker run` streaming to a local PTY, but even streams input files for `docker build` to the Docker daemon, entirely transparently. It’s really nice, as I never have to worry about whether Docker Desktop is running, has enough memory, is taking up my local disk space, etc. Surely there’s a way to do something like this but for vagrant? A Vagrant “thin client” that runs all the VMs on an IaaS service or in-office hypervisor cluster? > Vagrant is great for setting it up, but it doesn't really have a solution to changing it. Want to add a package? Nuke the VMs, start from scratch, and hope nobody runs into install issues. Option 1 (centrally managed Vagrant VMs via MDM): Keep the VM’s rootfs volume separate from its /home + /var volume, and push updates to the rootfs volumes via MDM (ideally using a binary diff system like Courgette.) Option 2: build a chroot under /opt with versions of everything you care about, using e.g. Nix. Then create an apt/RPM package that in turn uses chef/puppet/etc to update this chroot within the VMs. (This is basically what Gitlab does for their self-hosted installable.) Still not as good as just pulling a new Docker image… but possible.