Ask for a Mac ? At this point enough manager were sold on it that most places have to support MacOS, and its popular enough with devs to also have to support dev environments on it.
Like even if you prefer Linux, Mac is a huge step up over windows and WSL if those were your only options.
Also latest Mac machines aren't even that overpriced as they were before their in-house CPUs, for the performance you get really there is only one PC chip out there right now that can be compared and that chip is available in like 2 laptops.
If you want to run Linux how is macOS a step up? It's a non starter.
Linux is Linux
Windows offers Wsl1 and Wsl2 integration
The closest thing macOS has in any official capacity is their containers project, running each container in a VM for "security" at the expense of poor resource allocation and no compatibility with table stakes tooling like compose.
I also considered this, but I was not able to solve the security problems. That remote server must (or not?) hold all my SSH keys, AWS creds, and other stuff, to even be useful. Secops guys would kill me for this. Until then, WSL is good enough.
I know "secops" guys tend to not really understand what's going on, but you can sell it as just a different computer. You could compromise and install whatever handbrake^w security product they like. Bonus points for that computer being separate from the one where you usually browse the interwebs and such.
However, in practice, at least for the kind of compiling I do, AWS EC2 VMs tend not to be faster than my cheap HP Elitebook. Maybe if you can leverage a hefty number of cores, the situation is different. For regular email pushing, the laptop is good enough.
Our secops guys broke most of our laptops so the engineering teams can't use them for development. They told them to use a Hyper-V VM. So they do. With a Hyper-V vswitch that talks directly to the ethernet adapter rather than the VPN connection. So effectively their policy leads to all those SSH keys, AWS credentials and other stuff to be stored on a virtual machine which is connected directly to the public internet and bypasses all DLP and security controls.
The more I work with secops people the more I fail to trust or respect them.
I have something like that at work for testing Windows things, since my work machine is a Mac.
It's pretty miserable in terms of latency and window management. If you can get this to work well with NX or X forwarding, that's cool, but it's a second class offering when that's your only option.
Windows RDP used to be great, but now they figured they'd put animations and transparencies all over the place, so it's become very frustrating to use. Even over a local Gigabit network.
Like even if you prefer Linux, Mac is a huge step up over windows and WSL if those were your only options.
Also latest Mac machines aren't even that overpriced as they were before their in-house CPUs, for the performance you get really there is only one PC chip out there right now that can be compared and that chip is available in like 2 laptops.