I live on a big island in the southern hemisphere. Working remotely on a Linode is painful due to latency even with mosh. I tied Fremont for ages but the latency was too much so I moved to Tokyo which is a little better but I still prefer to work with a VM locally. Vagrant gets the job done but I would prefer an alternative.

I don't like Ruby. I don't like running virtualbox when I could be running an lxc jail with something like docker. I think I will be ditching OS X and moving back to a Linux desktop as soon as I find the right laptop.

My VPS is in London, never noticed any latency in Turkey and US. I guess Linode now has bunch of more cities, check them out.

For laptop, I recommend Macbook Air. The design, is a master piece of minimalism. As a guy who used Xmonad for years, I think OSX and a Linux VPS is the zen combo.

Turkey is really close to London. Domestic traffic in Australia travels further than that. It is quite a different matter round tripping packets across the pacific to another continent. I can do minor edits on a Linode but I much prefer using a local solution like vagrant. I would like to ditch OSX but the hardware/os combo is hard to beat.

Hate to be "that guy", but why bother showing up to the game if you're going to be distracted most of the time?

I (and probably most of us) focus much better when I change my environment. Using a VPS mobilizes your entire development environment.

So your brother's match is just an excuse to test the Hawthorne Effect? I hope you at least pretend to cheer.

I have Vagrant running on my laptop. I don't require an Internet connection to work.

Yes and that's the why you can't use multiple devices to access same environment. I highly recommend you to give linode + tmux + emacs/vim as an IDE.

I do the same, and love it. It really frees me to work anywhere, and instantly connect to an already-running dev-box just where I left it last time.

However, the only problem I have convincing my teammates is that they use TextMate/Sublime, and that's the only thing that seems to break this, where Vagrant is potentially easier (you can share a local folder).

I tried things like rsync and fuse over ssh, but they seem a bit sluggish or not-so-transparent. I wish there was some tool that would solve this.

That's a nonissue for anyone that only codes on one device, and it comes with dependence on a decent internet connection. When you have a decent sized team I imagine a vagrant box and git pull are probably a better option anyways. Plus vagrant is free.

I think Vagrant is the best VM management tool for laptop.