I'm likely not the target audience, but I personally see "client-only" as a disadvantage. Ultimately I use VS Code to stand up devcontainers on my laptop, but I sometimes need to do dev work on my iPad and don't want to pay for Github Codespaces. Gitpod has worked for me in the past and I've gotten Coder setup.
Maybe this will be nice to get Jetbrains IDEs working with the devcontainer standard, since IIRC they don't support this at the moment
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.
Will the server-side option still be included in the open source version? I have almost the same use-case. I want to run devpod (or something) in my homelab and sometimes access it from my ipad.
I've been wishing that JetBrains and Posit (nee RStudio) would adopt the devcontainer standard, but then I just read this article [1] about how MSFT is using VS Code's weird mix of open-source and proprietary components to fracture the market and ensure that any competitors who try to build off of VS Code are at a permanent disadvantage. Now I'm having second thoughts.
Devcontainers are a good example of their strategy. VS Code's source code is open source, but the devcontainers extension is not [2] and alternative vscode-in-the-browser providers are not able to use the devcontainers extension as they're not allowed to use the official VS Code extension marketplace.
Client-only is the prime selling point for me. A common project for our engineers is building/updating data ETLs & reports off of sensitive healthcare data. Since our engineer's laptops are already fully configured and registered to handle this sort of data, we wouldn't have to worry about the security/tracking of each developer potentially sending this data to more places than it needs to be.
Although they've basically closed source it since release, Jetbrains Projector was a fantastic tool I've used a lot in the past for that - Just spin up a docker container on my home server and pull out my ipad keyboard
Maybe this will be nice to get Jetbrains IDEs working with the devcontainer standard, since IIRC they don't support this at the moment