If you're testing a Chef run, you probably don't want to use MacOS because your target deployment OS is likely some Linux variant. You are right about file per

If you're testing a Chef run, you probably don't want to use MacOS because your target deployment OS is likely some Linux variant. You are right about file permissions, it's the one downside I've noticed but luckily it's a non-issue. You can just chmod your files and folders in your deploy scripts/recipes/playbooks. This is a good practice anyways and I would do that in any case. Also in any case, if I were testing deploy scripts I would always do that in a VM or staging server even if I ran Linux natively, because you wouldn't want to corrupt your development box with project specific deploy infrastructure. Oh yeah, the permissions also don't bother you in development. For example I can just cd into my development files (which are outside of WSL) and run VSCode on it without sudo or any tricks, and it all just works. They are accessible from within WSL too without using sudo (even tho they are owned by root:root according to WSL while I'm logged in as my user).