In my experience, by the time you’re compiling and running code and installing dev dependencies on the remote machine, the size of the base OS isn’t a concern. I gained nothing from using smaller distros but lost a lot of time dealing with little issues and incompatibilities.
This won’t win me any hacker points, but now if I need a remote graphical Linux VM I go straight for the latest Ubuntu and call it day. Then I can get to work on my code and not chasing my tail with all of the little quirks that appear from using less popular distros.
The small distros have their place for specific use cases, especially automation, testing, or other things that need to scale. For one-offs where you’re already going to be installing a lot of other things and doing resource intensive work, it’s a safer bet to go with a popular full-size distro so you can focus on what matters.
I'm all for suggestions for a better base OS in small docker containers, mostly to run nginx, php, postgress, mysql, redis, and python.
> Alpine uses musl instead of glibc for the C standard library. This has caused me all types of trouble in unexpected places.
https://purplecarrot.co.uk/post/2021-09-04-does_alpine-resol...
No precompiled Linux stuff runs. No Chrome, no 3rd party Electron apps work unless specifically ported. For me, no Slack, no Panwriter, no Ferdium.
Flatpak works, sort of, with restrictions. Snap doesn't.
Question, I use VirtualBox, but I feel it's kind a laggy sometimes, What do you use? Any suggestion on performance improvements?
Never really got what it’s for.
It'd be best with hardwired network though.
It will increase the size of the VM but the template would be smaller than a full blown OS
Aside from dev containers, what are other options? I'm not able to run intellij on my laptop, is not an option
I use Nvim to ssh into my computer to work, which is fine. But really miss the full capacity of intellij