Yes! This what I usually do. I will develop on the host using tools installed via Homebrew, then package/build/test via docker.

And to be clear, I really love the ideas behind Bluefin and use it every day. I’ve just kind of given up on devcontainers, specifically.

Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.

They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.

Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).

And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…

Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.

They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.

Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.

This looks pretty cool!

And is only ONE of the reasons Yar’s Revenge is awesome!

Thanks for posting this. I’ve been thinking about picking it up.

Those games are so good

Yep, my birthday is very early in April. Having two Easters in the same year of my life happens from time to time.

I’ll take my Motorola Razr back from the early 00s.

Whether I do Captain Kirk impressions with it in the privacy of my own home is my business…

Well, the bar was low…

I agree, but knowing it’s from Norway makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of using it than if it was made in the US…. (And I’m American…)

I’ll be honest. After Starfield, I’m not entirely sure I want them to do it…

I the context of Linux and self-hosting “prepping” is usually more about maintaining services you find useful in a way that you can do it yourself, as opposed to relying on Google or Amazon (etc) who could pull the rug out from under you at basically any time.

That’s awesome. Very 1960s Star Trek, in a good way.

This person knows what they are talking about.

I’m the same in that I was in elementary school when the NES was “the thing to have”… but I don’t think we could afford it at the time.

When I asked my parents for an NES for my seventh birthday in 1989, I got a 2600 and 40-ish games instead. Years later my mom told me she bought the whole thing at a yard sale for about $40.

It wasn’t the latest and greatest… but I didn’t care. I loved it. I had a great time exploring the cartridges, most of them had manuals to go with them, and playing with my dad.

An uncle would later give us an old 386 PC and I played DOS games on it.

I did get a SNES around 1992, so I did have my fair share of Nintendo as a kid. But I certainly didn’t start there and knew that there was more to video games than Nintendo.

I was still playing my 2600 and SNES when I graduated from high school, along with playing CRPGs on the family computer too.

It’s the best one!

I might be in the minority, but I get more excited about the idea of maintaining/working on some creaky old legacy code base than I do about the idea of starting a new project from scratch.

I love doing that…

Hmmm, interesting. I like brew, for sure. And devcontainers worked ok for me when I was working on something by myself.

But as soon as I started working on a side project with a friend, who uses Ubuntu and was not trying to develop inside a container, things got more complicated and I decided to just use brew instead. I’m sure I could have figured it out, but we are both working full time and have families and are just doing this for fun. I didn’t want to hold us up!

Our little project’s back end runs in a docker compose with a Postgres instance. It’s no problem to run it like that for testing.

Maybe a re-read of the documentation for devcontainers would help…

Personally, I have found the developer experience on Bluefin-dx (the only one I’ve tried…) to be…. mixed.

VSCode + Devcontainers, which are the recommended path, are pretty fiddly. I have spent as much time trying to get them to behave themselves as I have actually writing code.

Personally, I’ve resorted to using Homebrew to install dev tools. The CLI tools it installs are sandboxed to the user’s home directory and they have everything.

It’s not containers - I deploy stuff in containers all the time. But, at least right now, the tooling to actually develop inside containers is kind of awkward. Or at least that’s been my experience so far.

I think the ublue project is fantastic and I really like what they are doing. But most of the world of developer tooling just isn’t there yet. Everything you can think of has instructions on how to get it going in Ubuntu in a traditional installation. We just aren’t there yet with things like Devcontainers.