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

- abstracting away the fact that you run stuff inside containers in the IDE and abstracting away the container life cycle

- cryptic error states and error messages, especially when setting up new projects from scratch. This often boiled down to bad plugins (even Microsoft's own VSCode plugins wet the bed often)

- only superficial support for podman

- bad support for arm based HW (and arch translation issues, like a tool requesting arm containers but the host running docker is x64)

At this point I consult teams to try out a plain compose.yml as a CDE and skip the "enterprise" stuff.