[coldtea]

I'd say go with VMs.

It's only a pain if you don't invest a week or so to master their use (which a knowledgable unix dev can also do in 1-2 days).

Installing "all databases and dependencies" on the Mac with Homebrew is not scalable, and it's not repeatable, and it's too kludgy. And when multiple versions of libs and such start to be needed, it wont even work.

(For small scale stuff, like some Wordpress development, it might be ok. But it would still be better to use a VM).

You won't deploy on a Mac in the end, but on some Linux box, so develop on a VM offering the same environment.

Note that I would still develop on a VM even if I was using Linux as a desktop -- you should not mix your desktop machine with your development environment.