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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is video performance in VMs. It still just...kind of sucks. Running Cinnamon in a VM is just about impossible to get GL acceleration working properly.

nvidia gates it's virtualized GPU offerings behind their enterprise cards, so we're left with ineffective command translation.

IMO: I can tolerate just about every other type of VM overhead, but choppy/unresponsive GUIs have a surprisingly bad ergonomic effect (and somehow leak into the performance of everything else).

If we could get that fixed, at least amongst Linux-on-Linux virtualization, I think virtualizing everything would be a much more tenable option.

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There are ways around it. There is a community of people who use Nvidia enterprise cards with vGPU for gaming, performance is excellent, or PCI pass through an entire GPU.

If you can't do that because it's for company/corporate purposes then I can sympathise with not wanting to pay Nvidia's prices.

You can get good security without virtualization, for example SeLinux and namespaces in Linux. Jails in BSD and zones in Solaris. We would have many viable and competing solutions if it wasn't for Microsoft monopoly.

But would it matter much for development? Either SSH into the VM and use vi/emacs or use an IDE/editor with remote support. VS Code even lets you use a container as a development environment (I know, not a VM by default):

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

I don't know about VS Code's dev containers extension but the SSH extension's README says:

> Using Remote-SSH opens a connection between your local machine and the remote. Only use Remote-SSH to connect to secure remote machines that you trust and that are owned by a party whom you trust. A compromised remote could use the VS Code Remote connection to execute code on your local machine.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

If you're worried about extensions there's also:

> When a user installs an extension, VS Code automatically installs it to the correct location based on its kind. If an extension can run as either kind, VS Code will attempt to choose the optimal one for the situation;

https://code.visualstudio.com/api/advanced-topics/remote-ext...

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