As I consider a nuke and pave on my central development Mac, I start thinking about all those tweaks and tools I've set up over time and will never remember until after resetting.

I started thinking about moving my entire development stack to a virtual machine and doing it there, leaving my main install OS cleaner and probably much faster for the everyday things that are not development tasks.

When the time comes for something to break, I can clone my fresh VM, which is ready to run and clone down any of my code. Then, I return to work: no fuss, no mess, and little time involved.

With this in mind, I have started experimenting with setting up a macOS and Linux VM. I'm gradually working on it as time permits to see if this goal is attainable.

I know that I will encounter the problem of not being able to log into the Apple App Store on the Mac, but that might not present much of an issue unless Xcode decides I cannot log into my developer account.

I'm more interested in seeing if I can create a working developer environment in Linux that gives me everything except Apple platform development. That will still be a win since it takes me back to my Web development days, and I still have plenty of things to work on there. This was my setup before I moved to mobile apps as my primary daily role.

Given that the biggest problem is always NPM, Cocoapods, Ruby, and 3rd party libraries, which are the main reasons my development stack breaks, this alone makes it worth spending time trying to improve my setup.

I'll report back as work continues.