This depends on both the development environment you're setting up and the skill level. If you're not familiar with the OS' terminal, dependencies or installer

This depends on both the development environment you're setting up and the skill level. If you're not familiar with the OS' terminal, dependencies or installers then those are just additional barriers to getting down to programming. With a prepared development environment for say Rails or Meteor you can get started very quickly learning to develop with these frameworks. For some development environments it was previously a pain on Windows, while this has changed for Meteor it's still not as friendly for Rails. If you can offload those problems to a hosted environment that's a big win.