I prefer devcontainers for more involved project setups as they keep it lighter than introducing a VM. It’s also pretty easy to work with Docker (on your host) with the docker-outside-of-docker feature.

However, I’m also curious about using NixOS for dev environments. I think there’s untapped potential there.

we love nix for dev environments, and highly recommend it. many other problems go away. don't see that as what's being solved here, though.

containers contain stuff the way an open bookcase contains books, they're just namespaces and cgroups on a file system overlay, more or less, held together by willpower not boundaries:

https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/10/what-even-is-a-container/

https://github.com/p8952/bocker

as a firm required to care about infosec, we appreciate the stance in their (2). and MacOS VMs are so fast now, they might as well be containers except, you know, they work. (if not fast, that should be fixed.)

that said, yes, running local minikube and the like remain incredibly useful for mocking container envs where the whole environment is inside a machine(s) boundary. containers are _almost_ as awesome as bookcases…