However, you as a person will only have 1 machine.
1 machine at a time.
A configuration allows you to setup a new machine quickly and consistently when one breaks, get stolen, or lost in an inconvenient time.
More importantly, as a developer you want a clean and consistent development environment so that you do not depend on anything accidentally installed on the machine.
In a previous project, development was tied to a specific machine and until I fixed it, the team simply could not migrate to a new machine if anything happened to it.
I’m my experience, softwares (and related configs) change enough from one machine to the next that it’s mostly a waste of time. Unless you plan on switching hardware yearly or something it’s a waste of time to overthink so sort of config management.
On top of that you are unlikely to do and need the exact same thing when you will be switching hardware (considering how evolution has slowed down); and new hardware is very often motivated by a change of activity (so the relevant specs and setup te d to change).
Don’t overthink it, just install a plain old windows, use VMs to test stuff and fix things as you go along.
Nowadays Windows is stable enough that you are unlikely to need much fixing until you are ready to change the hardware anyway…
Comments
1 machine at a time.
A configuration allows you to setup a new machine quickly and consistently when one breaks, get stolen, or lost in an inconvenient time.
More importantly, as a developer you want a clean and consistent development environment so that you do not depend on anything accidentally installed on the machine.
In a previous project, development was tied to a specific machine and until I fixed it, the team simply could not migrate to a new machine if anything happened to it.
I’m my experience, softwares (and related configs) change enough from one machine to the next that it’s mostly a waste of time. Unless you plan on switching hardware yearly or something it’s a waste of time to overthink so sort of config management.
On top of that you are unlikely to do and need the exact same thing when you will be switching hardware (considering how evolution has slowed down); and new hardware is very often motivated by a change of activity (so the relevant specs and setup te d to change).
Don’t overthink it, just install a plain old windows, use VMs to test stuff and fix things as you go along. Nowadays Windows is stable enough that you are unlikely to need much fixing until you are ready to change the hardware anyway…
If windows is running in a VM, it might end up being faster having backups of said VM and keep using nix as the host OS.