[tvon]

> (...) most developers setting up vagrant on their Mac just to get a working environment.

What kind of working environment requires setting up Vagrant on OSX? It's a Unix-based OS, if you're doing any web development you can do it on the host system.

[DCoder]

Isolation and reproduction.

For one thing, you want the development environment to be as similar to production as possible – same OS version, same webserver version, same DB version, same dependencies, no unwanted extras that differ between environments.

For another thing, you don't want to have to solve conflicts between project A and completely unrelated project T if you need to work on them both.

[tvon]

If you care about isolation and reproduction then you're using a VM anyway and the host OS is completely irrelevant.

[DCoder]

Using a VM is the reason to use Vagrant.

[tvon]

Yes, I know.

[amiga-workbench]

You generally develop on the platform that your software will end up running on, and nobody in their right mind uses OSX on a server.

[Const-me]

If you have a SaaS product that needs 3D rendering on the server, Windows and Linux servers that have a GPU are targeted towards GPGPU and are expensive to rent.

MacPros have two descent AMD FirePro GPUs but much cheaper to rent.

[tvon]

If you are trying to match your production platform then you will use a VM of some sort in Linux anyway. If you are not trying to match your production platform then you can develop just fine on OSX.