That's exactly the difference. You don't need to pay for codespaces and are locked into 1 cloud provider. You can use whatever cloud you want with DevPod
Thanks for opening an issue! We'll definitely look into that. Would love to learn more about your experiences with DevSpace as well. If you're open to chatting, reach out via slack or via lukas [at] loft [dot] sh
Haha, spicy. We definitely don't want to overlook nix. It's a great tool. We do mean something different with "developer environment" in that context of this quoted sentence. I'm not sure if nix will help you much if you want to connect your VS Code to a remote VM or container to work inside of that environment. We'll work on rewording this though to make things clearer :)
Thanks for trying it! Can you open an issue on GH about this or join us on slack, so we can dig deeper into making this work for non-root podman with your input?
Don't worry. We'll be adding a server-side option for DevPod Desktop app to connect to for enabling thin-client/browser-based work but the cool thing is that this is not a requirement to use DevPod. It's more like Terraform and Terraform Cloud. You can run with Terraform and use it entirely client-only but you can also have server-side solution on top for specific things that just need central management.
That's correct. It uses the .devcontainer.json standard to define everything as code and it abstracts the cloud/infra and allows for an easy way to spin up a dev environment with a .devcontainer.json in any infra
Port-forwarding and using your local IDE is already working in DevPod today. We also added auto-port-forward where it watches what happens inside the container and then starts port-forwarding automagically.
File sync: That is a great idea. We got that in DevSpace already as you mentioned and we definitely think this could be super valuable in DevPod as well. Right now, a git push and then pull is required to get things from inside DevPod updated on local but with sync this would be even easier and faster.
Adding devcontainer.json and then using DevPod with it should be pretty straight-forward for you. You can use docker-compose inside devcontainer.json if you want to reuse your existing setup.
There are 3 main differences:
1) DevPod is based on GitHub/Microsoft's devcontainer.json standard while GitPod has their own file format
2) DevPod is client-only more like Terraform where the client creates/manages things directly using cloud credentials vs GitPod is a server-side solution to manage and provision dev workspaces
3) DevPod has a provider concept similar to Terraform that allows you to provision dev environments in ANY infra vs GitPod is mostly a hosted solution (they do have the option to host it yourself as well but it's usually you install it to one cloud and then provision in that same cloud vs DevPod is 1 client (no server, see point 2) and then you deploy the dev env in ANY cloud or even locally in Docker or local k8s)