Vagrant

Raised as a usability problem by 30 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2011–2023), in 25 threads.

People raised many different problems with Vagrant, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 30 complaints

Using Vagrant with KVM was painful; plugin install awful and box support poor2023-12-15
Builds are slow, memory hungry, and frustrating to debug2022-06-22
Every command takes 3-30 seconds, even trivial ones2021-06-12
CLI takes seconds to start, even to print help2020-03-18
Infuriating startup delays, needs restarts, and breaks inotify-based tools2019-05-09
Windows updates break the setup, costing a day finding compatible component versions2018-05-26
Opening the VM console before boot sets Caps Lock, breaking GRUB command line entry2017-10-28
Filesystem access is too slow on Windows, pushing the user to another setup2017-10-27
Multi-NIC VMs randomly stop responding to network requests after startup due to DHCP client behavior2017-10-27
Vagrant was slow until the commenter switched shared folders to NFS2017-10-03
File watchers don't work right or are slow, and git status hangs the box2017-10-03
Installing boxes fails with a 'can't find this box' error no matter which box is used2017-04-20
Can never remember the syntax and debugging install commands has a long feedback loop2017-03-29
File sharing between host and VM is slow and buggy by default2016-12-02
Environment setup is painful, especially remotely on operating systems they don't use2016-08-28
Spent more time working around bugs and rebuilding VMs than doing real work2015-09-28
Provisioning and re-running scripts on fresh VMs is slow and painful2015-07-30
Vagrant on Windows needs extra workarounds like installing Git to get ssh working2015-02-14
Ssh-agent never works during provisioning, and machines must be destroyed and recreated after failed attempts2015-02-14
Page loads take 20s to a minute, far slower than running directly on the Mac2014-12-10
Sidebar disappears on narrow windows and sections can't expand without navigating to root2014-02-27
Installing a plugin fails unless dependencies are installed in a very specific order2013-12-09
Default folder sharing is nearly unusable and hard to explain with NFS setup2013-12-01
VM gets stuck on grub after abnormal shutdown, requiring manual GUI fix2013-06-09
After a disconnect, can't reconnect with vagrant ssh and must restart the VM2013-06-09
Sharing libraries and environments between IDE and VM is slow and problematic2012-12-16
Convoluted XML config and massive documentation make it hard to use2012-08-20
VirtualBox guest freezes for 30-60 seconds during heavy disk IO on OS X2012-07-04
Every new project needs a VM, slowing down getting a project running2012-06-21
Doesn't work on a vanilla Debian workstation, and the commenter gave up2011-05-15