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Ditching Vagrant

The author explains why they stopped using Vagrant for local development environments, citing reasons such as its slow performance, limitations of VirtualBox, and the growing availability of simpler alternatives like Docker and remote development tools like Dev Containers.

Background

- **Vagrant** is a tool for managing virtual machines (VMs) via a simple configuration file ("Vagrantfile"), widely used in dev environments to spin up reproducible Linux boxes on macOS/Windows hosts. It wraps providers like VirtualBox, VMware, and Docker. - The author moved from Vagrant to a lighter setup: **Multipass** (Ubuntu's minimal VM manager) for quick Ubuntu VMs, or directly running VMs via **QEMU** (a performant emulator/virtualizer, used as an alternative to VirtualBox) with cloud-init configs and Ansible provisioning. - **Nix** and **NixOS** are mentioned — Nix is a purely functional package manager that guarantees reproducible environments; NixOS is a Linux distro built on it. Using Nix alongside VMs lets the author handle dependencies declaratively instead of relying on Vagrant's provisioning. - The switch reflects a broader trend: developers moving away from heavy, opinionated tooling (Vagrant) toward composable, minimal alternatives that give them more control and faster performance on modern hardware.

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