Probably the simplest approach that lets you do local dev is VirtualBox + Vagrant + an Ubuntu box. This combination shouldn't take a great deal of time to setup

Probably the simplest approach that lets you do local dev is VirtualBox + Vagrant + an Ubuntu box. This combination shouldn't take a great deal of time to setup (10-20 minutes + download time), is pretty much zero cost and means you can use the laptop that you currently have. If you can do remote dev, then a cheap VPS might make sense, however this means that you need to be learning somewhere with 'net access.