Bluefin-dx users, share your development workflow.

[castrojo]

It's one week until Bluefin goes beta and we've been putting a bunch of effort into the developer workflow. Please feel free to participate, even if you don't use Bluefin!

We basically have four piles:

• devcontainers with vscode with or without devpod
• Distrobox/Toolbox
• Homebrew
• Devbox/Fleek for nix

We just had a discussion on chat about what tools people prefer to use, so I'd thought I'd start a quick poll with a little template so we can all document our preferred workflow. Then we can just add them to the docs as a little collection of ideas for people to start from.

Because I am now firmly convinced that the default "use toolbox for development" isn't working for people, and each combination of the things we're talking about offer so much more, especially considering you can always use toolbox/distrobox. Let's have some fun!!! 🌮 🌮

(Copy and paste my format so we can all match)

Mission: I were to convince a user to try bluefin-dx I would recommend:
Tools in order of preference (why and/or why not):

Devcontainers for Development

Open spec, multiple IDE support, great tooling. Devpod supports it which gives us great multicloud support with awesome local dev too. This is declarative, is in productions at a huge scale and every distro people care about have well maintained containers.

homebrew

CLI and random tools. htop, every neofetch clone, all the stuff people want but aren't easy to do if they come from other linuxes. And it's nice to have a seperation from your terminal tools and your work requirements, which are already specced out in devcontainers. Every cool new tool you read about is already in there because so many MacOS desktop users that are linux admins, this really takes advantage of that.

distrobox/toolbox

You'll still use this a ton, I'm still convinced we need a new terminal to really unlock this workflow but it's still awesome.

Devbox/Fleek

For the nix nerds, not my thing. I'm a fan of Determinate Systems and jetpack.io and they're all awesome people.

[rothgar]

Devcontainers

I generally only use this if I'm developing remotely or contributing to a repo that already has this configured. Setting it up for my personal stuff (not generally shared) is more overhead than I want.

homebrew

Use this for most tools because I have inertia using it with a Brewfile with most of the CLI based tools I use. Some system tools are not in brew or don't work as well because /home/linuxbrew is not in root's $PATH when you try to sudo

distrobox/toolbox

Use this mostly for GUI apps because I haven't found a good way to manage lots of distroboxes for development. Things like just update take a very long time with 5+ distroboxes because update layers are not shared and run sequentially.

Devbox/Fleek

I don't use this because I have an established dotfiles repo and not sure what additional value it adds.

[dreamyukii]

Devcontainers for Development

i loved it, devcontainers make it easy for me to do web development with nodejs,php,mysql/mariad

homebrew

i use this for tools that i don't want to layer or using distrobox

distrobox/toolbox

stop using this because its not really integrated into system

Devbox/Fleek

i use this on my desktop with kinoite-main but not on my laptop with bluefin-dx

[bigpod98]

not using bluefin-dx per say(i have my own bluefin build). depending on project but my main way is prebuilt podman container for specific language/stack then i use devcontainers extension in vscode to remote into it and work. But i have been planning a switch to a slightly modified workflow as i get kinda "mad" every time i use different selection of languages in single project which means new image so now im planning to build prebuilt containers per project on automated basis(yay way to much compute) and include stuff like ides and such inside it

what this means in long term is that all i need to do is pull a container "containing" a project and i can get started with all tools there on whatever machine and whit whichever tool thanks to included IDE's i have my own registry

[bketelsen]

homebrew

I use this for 70% of my dev work

distrobox/toolbox

Do not use at all

Devbox/Fleek

I use this for the nix related work I do

LXD/Incus

I use LXD/Incus containers for dev environments per project, each may have nix/fleek or a linux brew setup

[castrojo]

Ah nuts I left out incus/lxc, good call out!