I would say that you should replicate the environment your product will run as closely as possible. So for a lot of us that means a web app of some kind runnin

I would say that you should replicate the environment your product will run as closely as possible. So for a lot of us that means a web app of some kind running on a Linux server. The simplest way to reliably reproduce that regardless of the native OS on the workstation is with a Virtual Machine. A container based solution is a distinct possibility (if the host is already Linux) for a lot of workloads but that still introduces more potential for unexpected differences, because now it's sharing kernel that isn't necessarily what's on prod. I think if you're using system containers like LX{C,D} to simulate a regular server environment it's probably fine. For those doing desktop app development, I assume VMs are more about testing procedures, but that regular daily development would just be "local" on the native OS.