I'm a bit confused as to why people are re-imaging their machines from one OS to another?

Use Vagrant (or Docker) and just set up an OS in a Virtual Machine? Then if you break it you just destroy it and provision it again. You don't destroy your whole machine.

I agree, all my Dev machines are vm's, it's so easy when windows update fucks you over to revert to snapshot

Yes, you are right.. But in some cases running an another os in vm is quite slow, and why would you waste precious ram and disk space, when you can change the os. What i'm trying to say is for example if you need windows but you have ubuntu (lol), and ubuntu has nothing you would want to keep it for, then there is no reason to keep it. This could be a case if you like really had to rely on win only programs...

@Redo a vm's is only slow if your host is under powered, I regularly run 3 or more VM's on my laptop and don't see any performance difference. I guess it's all about the hardware you run on. I run an i7 with 8 threads and 32GB RAM. If I was trying the same on an i3 I would get worse performance in my VM's. Your neither right nor wrong, it depends on the purpose of your VM

@philcr To be honest, thats part of what i meant..

For example i know that my laptop isn't capable of running any kind of vm (fast enough), and even when i do android, i have to get my physical device :)

@philcr how much did you pay for your computer?

@superamadeus about £1800 before tax

@philcr yeah a lot of people don't have that luxury.

@superamadeus I'm sure they don't, a reasonable i5 in a 500 pound laptop can get you something will run VM's though. Ebuyer regularly do HP i5's for 300, £60 for an SSD and another 50 for some more ram you can VM your Dev machine

@philcr no, they won't. Not powerful enough to seriously consider a vm as the primary environment

@superamadeus it depends what you are running in your primary environment, from what I read on Dev rant people seem to use Dev machines for games too. If you are running VS code or atom the lower end stuff with an ssd and extra ram will cope with running VM's. I'm not looking for a war just adding my two cents

@philcr I get you. I guess I'm just biased against VMs, though I use them a lot as a supplement to my primary environment.

@superamadeus I maintain our companies infrastructure which is all virtualised, and I also look after the software team. We use a lot of different industrial / PLC ide's that don't play well together so our options were separate hard disks per supplier; beckhoff, Rockwell, Siemens, omron Microsoft

Or buy a bigger laptop and virtualise. Using VM's means if I need to borrow a colleagues machine it's not a chore and as all our laptops are similar spec we rarely have to reactivate windows / ide's

Also means I can give the guys a locked down company machine with email etc, and they can do what they like with their Dev machines

I'd actually quite like to not be VM for visual studio as it uses hyper-v for emulating android etc. Hyper-V and VMware workstation don't play well together.

I see both sides of the argument, but in my environment VM's are essential

@philcr For me, lately I've been working in cross platform technologies anyway, so the only time I use virtualization is for testing on other platforms or running certain services in a controlled environment. I do understand your necessity though and why it's a good solution.

@superamadeus I have hackintosh VM so visual studio can compile xamarin stuff for iOS that really is handy, saved having to splash a load of cash on a Mac for the playground stufff I compile like once a month