My personal machine runs Ubuntu 20.04 and Local works well for me! I’ve done QA under a few other distributions as well and haven’t encountered anything significant.
Allowing Local to write to the Hosts file is the only way that Local can notify the computer to point a browser to the WordPress site that Local manages. Without modifying the hosts file, the computer has no way of knowing that something like example.local should go to the WordPress site on your computer.
By letting Local edit the Hosts file, you’re basically letting it handle the tedious task of updating that file manually.
You don’t have to let Local manage those site domains for you. In that case, you have two options:
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Manually add each Local site’s domain to the hosts file. The lines that Local adds look something like this:
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Set Local to use the
localhostRouter Mode. This basically turns off the site-domains for the Local sites, and reduces some of the functionality, but it means that Local doesn’t need to write to the Hosts file. More info on the “Router Mode” setting can be found in this help doc:
Hope that helps clarify why Local needs to be able to edit the Hosts file @PortMacOnline!
As for getting MainWP up and running – that should work within a Local site, but I’ve seen some people have issues that usually revolve around needing to get a correct path to the openssl.cnf file. Here’s a topic that goes into that for Mac:
For your case @huskylogic – I’ve never tried setting up MainWP under Linux, so it would be cool if you posted a reply here in the forums with anything you find when taking it for a spin!