Working on a Virtual Machine

The time is fast approaching when I shall need to upgrade my venerable MacBook Pro. It’s done very well but is beginning to show its age. Partially as a result of this I’ve been thinking a lot recently about ways to be independent of specific machines for my work. I looked at renting a virtual cloud desktop but, while it’s possible, it’s quite expensive.

An alternative was to set up a virtual machine, install and configure all the software I need for work and then keep a copy on a portable drive so that I can use a computer in the office or, in dire need, borrow one from a friend, and have everything I need to be productive readily available.

It turned out to be incredibly easy to set that up, and I now have a nice Ubuntu VM entirely dedicated to work, with all the software I need installed and configured. At the start of the working day I fire it up, connect to the office VPN and off I go. When I’m done I can shut it down and my laptop is all mine. I wish I’d done this years ago.