It's unpopular because developers want to have root access to their machines whilst being proudly ignorant to how fast the sensitive medical data or financial data they're working on can fly out of the machine.

Even when provided a means to instantiate virtual machines where they can have root access within the virtual machine, a lot of them will bitch.

> Even when provided a means to instantiate virtual machines where they can have root access within the virtual machine, a lot of them will bitch.

Well, yeah. I spent a year or so doing all my work in a VM (for other reasons) and it sucked.

> proudly ignorant to how fast the sensitive medical data or financial data they're working on can fly out of the machine

Hey, this is an easy choice! If I can have local root XOR sensitive production data on my machine, I pick local root. Keep that PII the fuck away from my disk, please!! (Hell, do that whether I have root or not.)