It doesn’t take much effort to remain relatively safe on the internet so you don’t have to resort to dedicated hardware just for banking. Don’t install sketchy apps that you don’t need and stop clicking on every link that you see – that’s pretty much it. I found that this basic internet hygiene has a nice side benefit as well – it forms a habit of avoiding superfluous and/or crappy content altogether.

"Relatively" is itself a relative term.

You might be fine having apps as closely tied to your real identity as your banking app on a device that's constantly collecting location and other data about you, but privacy is important to some other people.

I’ll definitely have to try this. SSHFS didn’t work well for me when sharing files from the host to the guest but it might just work when sharing from the guest

Path mapping on PhpStorm was very tricky for me as well (I’m running Docker containers inside my VMs so I had to set up correct mapping in PhpStorm if I wanted to run tests from the IDE) and I’m only talking about regular file paths here (no \\wsl$\ prefixes)…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a bit pointless to worry about data exfiltration when we’re already talking about mounting (and, by extension, sharing) directories?

Not necessarily? I assumed the author was doing this in a work context and passing data between a physical corporate asset and a VM he created within it. It hasn't been exfiltrated until it leaves the corporate network.

I’m using this setup for my own projects but I suppose this setup could work in a work context as well if we’re talking about a work laptop with all of the project files already on it. In that case, I don’t see how spinning up a local VM and serving those files to the host would allow for data exfiltration, unless I’m misunderstanding you.

I am the author. :) I’ve clarified my use case at the top of the article. I’m not connecting to remote VMs or anything of the sort, all of this is happening in a local VM so the data exfiltration point does not seem to apply (unless I misunderstood your point).

More specifically, I’m having trouble seeing the issue with this approach if you’re, say, working on a laptop that has your project files and decide to spin up a local VM, place the files inside it and share them with the host via NFS/Samba/whatever.

I wonder how well would this work for things like node_modules?

This doesn’t work for me because I find the Ubuntu desktop experience to be quite horrible. It’s very janky way too often. I very much prefer working with headless Ubuntu instances since this is where Linux excels for my use cases. For GUI stuff I look elsewhere.

My use case is rather specific (web development) and my recommendation is of course not intended to cover all possible use cases. However, if you’re working on web projects and need VMs to isolate your development toolset then this is the approach I choose after years of experimentation.

If I understand you correctly, then yes, I have eventually decided that I should only compromise on performance where it hurts less, e.g. for IDE access. If you’re running your application on a web server inside the VM for example, then this is the place where you probably need the best performance possible since this is where you’re going to feel it the most.

I've never thought about using Syncthing for this, thanks for the idea!

Beware the many conflict files that may result.

Yeah the conflict files are no fun. You can, however, set up a sync location as "receiving only", which is neat if you have your IDE on the host and then just run things in the VM. Though I run it in 2-way mode because of the cache file syncing and such

I'm using Rsync for this stuff.

PhpStorm has the Jetbrains Gateway which allows running the IDE on the VM and connecting to it using a client on the host. However, I found this to be a rather clunky approach when working on a local VM. I could imagine it working well if you’re developing on a remote machine but for local use cases this feels like an overengineered approach.