On: Ask HN: is Mac or Linux the choice for a modern web hacker?

[BadassFractal]

Do you ever feel that the Ubuntu VM isn't fast enough and you wish you had a real installation of the OS to work with, is the VM more than enough?

Also, what software do you use to manage that VM?

[kls → BadassFractal]

I have the last gen of the core-duo MBP 17, it has the 2.8 GHZ processor, 8 Gigs or RAM and a solid state drive. For me the answer to your question is no. I would imagine that with the new MBP it would be better but with my set up. I really only have waits on VM boot-up and a lag when I have not used a running VM in a while. Other than that it feels just as responsive when I am actively using the VM. I mainly use it for a windows VM though because I do, do .NET development from time to time. I use my desktop VMWare software to virtualize development OS'es for server VM's I have a server box that runs ESX server, which runs server like the Oracle stack, a VM that runs the IBM stack and one that runs the windows stack. Another note about my setup is that I use VMWare Fusion I used several other products and VMware just seemed to be the most responsive under OSX.

[steventruong → BadassFractal]

You could always boot into the full OS but I've never had any issues with it being too slow or not fast enough when running VM. But then again, it all depends on your machine.

That said (since I'm already responding to this, I'll answer the original question here too), the best answer is usually whatever you're most comfortable working with. However, the exception here for me is that I would personally prefer a Mac simply because I could install Linux and that a Mac is required for iDev.

[signa11 → BadassFractal]

> Also, what software do you use to manage that VM? could you please clarify what you mean by managing a vm ? are you looking at running 100's or even 1000's of vm ? are you running your vm on dedicated h/w (most likely not !) which would most likely involve migrating running vm's across server blades etc. etc. for development needs, a handful of vm's can be very easily 'managed' by your virtualization solution...

[BadassFractal → signa11]

Managing is a bit of an overloaded term, I agree that it could be misunderstood.

I was only asking about the software used to boot, save, load and configure one or two VMs on a dev box.

[johnny22 → BadassFractal]

I use linux for development, but i still keep my dev environment separate via http://vagrantup.com/ .

I've found it fast enough except when using the shared folder support. My laptop could use a faster disk though. So .. YMMV.

[mattbillenstein → BadassFractal]

VirtualBox - free, good features, pretty bulletproof in my experience.

As far as performance, I find it's good enough, but there are times I wish I had an SSD in my laptop to speed up some things...

[kls → mattbillenstein]

I actually switched back to VMWare Fusion from Virtual Box. I was having a lot of issue with the performance of VirtualBox. I will readily admit that I did not try to optimize it but out of the box, I found that VMWare was far more responsive than VirtualBox on OSX.