[voyager1]

Protip if you have good internet and don't want to configure everything locally: Jetbrains Gateway [1].

At the last company we had Docker, Java 8, Wildfly 10, Gradle 4 and I didn't manage to make it run locally on M1.

I was pleasently surprised with how smooth it was to connect to Ubuntu VM with Jetbrains Gateway. You use native Jetbrains app on your computer (Intellij Idea in my case), but everything is executed and compiled on the remote machine (Ubuntu VM). Another huge upside is that Docker is running on Ubuntu, which is a lot faster than on OSX. Downside is that your are dependant on the Internet ofcourse.

Officially the product is still in Beta, but it worked good enough for me.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

[hbn]

It's good to have the option, but ideally if I buy a really nice new computer, I'd like to actually be taking advantage of that hardware I paid for!

[ChuckNorris89]

Yeah, same. I don't get the point of buying an expensive and benchmark crushing piece of ARM hardware for some development work if it has the utility of a $200 Chromebook where you have to SSH into powerful X86 machines to actually achieve your development goal.

[sixothree]

Doesn't mean you can't run that Ubuntu instance in a VM on the same machine. Wait does it? Can you run VMs on these guys?

[rerx]

Gave this a try a few weeks ago (for CLion with Jetbrains Client, IntelliJ for Java might be further of course) and felt it was still quite lacking. Loads of features weren't there yet. Of the top of my head: no way to use my customized keymap, no git blame annotations, fundamental navigation shortcuts missing (jump back, navigate via file structure), no way to attach the debugger to a process, ...

I went back to remote controlling the full-featured IDE via Projector, their earlier approach too remote development. That works extremely well for what it is. Probably the richer Gateway client will catch up in a while, but not quite yet.

[foobarian]

I am able to attach to the remote JVM fine. However the roundtrip makes the QoL features like getting object contents a little slow. But it works!

The main issue I've seen is the gateway/target JVM combo gets wedged in some weird state somehow that persists across retarts and I found myself killing idea processes by hand on the remote server. But hey it's Beta! Works pretty excellent considering.

[gjvc]

looks like Projector is somewhat deprecated and removed from the Toolbox app (internal YouTrack item https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/TBX-7455)

they do state on this page https://lp.jetbrains.com/projector/ "If you're not sure which solution you should choose, please consider using Gateway."

[pmulv]

> no git blame annotations

Thanks for mentioning this. I was going to give this a try this weekend but that's a dealbreaker for me.

[matsemann]

Ah, very cool. For java dev I haven't yet felt the need to containerize anything, normally mvn clean install works and does everything needed. But for Python I've used remote interpreters through docker in PyCharm lately (since getting a python env installed with wheels & stuff properly is sometimes almost impossible).

VSCode have had some more luck with their frontend/backend architecture making it easier to pull off, glad to see jetbrains is on the move, as I prefer them.

[eropple]

YMMV, but I've had very good luck just using asdf for...pretty much everything, Python included. In a normal week I'll probably touch half a dozen environments--Node, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, Golang, maybe sometimes dotnet-core--and asdf not only Just Works for me, but has done so without thinking about it for going on three years or so, when stuff like rvm/rbenv changed rapidly enough as to necessitate changing it up to stay on the same page as my teammates.

No relation, just a super happy user.

[sz4kerto]

We're moving our whole company to this product right now. Instead of buying (and upgrading) more and more powerful laptops for our (fully remote) dev team, we just get them whatever thin&light stuff they want, and a dedicated server with large RAM so that they can run the whole test environment easily. There are some rough edges here and there, but it's a game changer.

[mhitza]

Thin clients are back on the menu.

I wanted to transition to this development model a year ago, but unfortunately X11 forwarding was slow on mobile connections, and as far as I'm aware (if you know a workaround let me know), on Linux, RDP can't be made to just share a single app, only full desktop sessions.

[pjmlp]

Welcome back to telnet + X Windows into the UNIX development server.

[olavgg]

Thank you for your suggestion, I just gave this a try, and it's almost there but there are still some rough edges. It needs to mature a little bit more.

Though this got me thinking a little bit, I have ordered a M1 Max 32GB which I have been waiting for over 5 months now. I am actually looking into getting the M1 air with 8GB as I think it will suffice for my Java development. I don't need to run VM's on that machine.

I'm gonna think about this through this weekend. I don't really need the firepower from the M1 Max as it has similar single core performance to the M1 air. And if this product matures, I will really not need that much RAM either.

[vonseel]

You should definitely give the M1 MBA a try and return it if it doesn’t work well. Mine is only 8Gb RAM too, but I haven’t noticed paging slowdowns or any problems.

[vital101]

This is similar to how developing with VSCode is on Windows + WSL.

[jhgb]

Emacs+SLIME has worked like this since the beginning.

[cstrat]

self hosted https://coder.com/ is amazing.

[moron4hire]

WSL does not run remotely. It runs in a VM locally.

[rieckpil]

Thanks for sharing this product. It looks really promising.

Testcontainers Cloud (https://www.atomicjar.com/2021/11/announcing-testcontainers-...) may be another tool to use for those that only want to "outsource" the container part of running intgeration tests.

[wccrawford]

I just tried to connect to my Intel OSX with Gateway and it told me that OSX/x86_64 isn't a valid combination and refused to connect.

I was hoping to use it to do most of my stuff remotely, instead of a remote client or a mouse/kb sharing program like Barrier.

[mhoad]

As an alternative I’ve had great experiences so far with GitHub’s Codespaces.

I couldn’t see myself going back to just running everything outside of at least some containerised environment at a minimum even if not fully remote.

I do a bunch of front end web stuff as well and now the thought of just running npm on my local machine gives me the chills. It’s akin to attending an orgy without a condom :)

[pc86]

No it's not

[shabazahmed]

VScode remote containers are much more flexible.

[digisign]

Do tell, how so?

[ta988]

Jetbrains Gateway doesn't work on M1. Unless you modify it heavily and you control it from the command line.

[sz4kerto]

It definitely does, without any kind of extra configuration or work.