doing dev in linux, the commands you run locally are the same ones you run in production. You install the same packages and control them in the same manner. I'm

doing dev in linux, the commands you run locally are the same ones you run in production. You install the same packages and control them in the same manner. I'm more comfortable in production because production is very similar to my local machine. my dev machine is a VM, which gives me a ton of other benefits, like portability, resizability, backups, versioning, and overall stability. I can (and have) given devs my VM to get up and running immediately on a complex project, without having to do a lot of setup. With each OSX update, usually stuff broke, needed to be reinstalled, or performed differently. With Linux, that is not the case. And with a linux VM, I can ride out host upgrades and keep plugging away with a machine i know works - or attempt an upgrade on a cloned VM and have a trivial way to backtrack if it fails.