Developers usually desire a fast platform. While it is true most OS hosts can virtualize Linux, there are at least three important caveats when considering macO

Developers usually desire a fast platform. While it is true most OS hosts can virtualize Linux, there are at least three important caveats when considering macOS. The first is that the file system performance is poor and chews up CPU when using file sharing [1]. The second is that if you are targeting x86_64 containers, you'll want to avoid full-virtualization and/or the Rosetta x86 to ARM translation later. Finally, the third is that if you work in machine learning, chances are you use NVIDA on the server, so you may want to do simple smoke testing of your containers locally, but Apple no longer ships computers with NVIDIA graphics cards. Now some of that is alleviated if you are building non-machine learning ARM images, but you may run the risk of not having ARM versions of third-party containers you need. I personally regret not thinking ahead about this and buying a MacBook Pro a few years ago. Either with Linux directly, or with Windows WSL2, I don't think developers need to buy a macOS machine unless they need to build iOS or macOS apps. And even then, you can rent time on GitHub-hosted Actions macOS runners instead. [1]: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/mac/#file-sharing https://docs.docker.com/desktop/mac/#file-sharing