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Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

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Re: Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

#22
I am interested in remote dev environments, but I'm not super excited about managing yet more software in the cloud.

There were some headaches around the exact specifics since it wasn't designed for this, but I liked the idea of using skypilot to launch dev machines in the cloud since it has plugins to all the cloud APIs and so you don't need to manage a k8s cluster to launch a dev machine. Admittedly it worked better for launching a Jupyter server than a "full" dev machine, but a full dev machine seemed to be just a few ssh/vs code configurations away.

Re: Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

#23
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent more than a year living with the numerous downsides of high level CDE (containerized development environment) tools. I must admit that I am very skeptical about all options available right now and that I have rolled back to using plain, old school, docker compose based CDE. Both .devcontainers and .devfile managed to create more effort than they took away. Some key points: - long lived containers - abstractin…

This seems to be podman focused from what I see.

No, not really. A big part of the problem is half baked software on the client side.

For devcontainers even the reference implementation CLI is significantly incomplete.

Re: Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

#24

A lot of remote dev environments have limitations when it comes to certain types of development. For example, ios and android app development can be tricky. Or game development where you need to have GPUs and build artifacts may be slow to download to your machine. Are there any guidances for how to fix this?

Founder of coder (https://github.com/coder/coder) here. We choose Terraform as our provisioning layer so that users can provision full blown VMs as their development environment.

We have many teams using GPUs with Coder for ML workloads but doing GUI/Game remote development where interactivity is essential remains elusive.

Re: Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

#25

This looks pretty good. Being able to use devcontainers on local server hardware without monthly fees (and/or hetzner servers) sounds great. Up until now we’d been making do with docker-compose and JetBrains’s remote SSH dev; this should be significantly better.

If this is what I think it is, Visual Studio Code has an extension that does this as well.

Re: Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be podman focused from what I see.

No, not really. A big part of the problem is half baked software on the client side. For devcontainers even the reference implementation CLI is significantly incomplete.

https://happihacking.com/blog/posts/2023/dev-containers-emac...

Looks pretty useable to me...

Re: Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

#28
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it easy to point the tool at a Git repo, have it automagically create a containerized environment for that repo with all its dependencies, and open Visual Studio Code on the codebase inside that remote containerized environment. Devcontainer was created by Microsoft to support Visual Studio Code's remote development features, so it works best in Visual Studio Code. Inasmuch as other IDEs support it, that's u…

So this is a config standard for the infrastructure underneath something like remote vscode / devcontainers?

Pretty much, yeah. It contains all the info necessary to tell Docker how to build/deploy the container, and how to configure the editor to work in it. The goal is turnkey setup of the software, its environment, and the user's IDE so that developers don't have to waste days doing that by hand.
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