[fencepost]

Ubuntu is also a good idea, your webserver is running native and there doesn't have to be some waste of time building a 'vagrant box' or whatever. All the instructions work too, so if you want to get things done with some linux application you just install it as per online instructions rather than find a paid for tool/software as a service workaround. ... Don't even bother with dual boot as Windows is a waste of space on a dual boot Ubuntu machine as you will never use it.

I will note that Windows 10 (Pro at least, not sure about Home) on laptops with appropriate virtualization capabilities can do a heck of a job of running Linux VMs with basically trivial setup. At a quick glance, the Microsoft Store (for installing software in Windows) includes VMs for Ubuntu, Ubuntu LTS, Debian, SUSE Enterprise, openSUSE and Kali.

One downside, I'm not sure how it is for spinning up multiple instances.

[Theodores]

Actually you just reminded me what Windows is good for in web development - testing on the 'Edge' or 'Internet Explorer' browsers.

Rather than run Windows native you can download and run the Virtualbox version Microsoft offer for free just for web developers to test browser compatibility with.

With Windows the file system is nowhere near as fast as Linux due to design considerations made in the MS-DOS and Windows NT days. If your code base has thousands of files then reading them across the file systems is a pain meaning that everything runs slow in Windows, the VM or both, particularly with Vagrant type setups. Native Ubuntu is like a breath of fresh air if you have had to work with compromised development arrangements where company policy dictates a slow Windows machine.

[fencepost]

I can believe that NTFS is slower than most Linux filesystems, though I'd be curious how much of that relates to things like use of ACLs, etc. Regardless, both security-related and filesystem-related speed differences on developer systems should be effectively negligible except in edge cases.

If filesystem differences are making a significant difference, it's time for someone to suck it up and spend a few hundred dollars on SSDs for the developers (and not the cheapest ones available, which frequently lack DRAM and can have their own speed issues).