[KaiserPro]

I hear ya, but there are tools for this sort of thing

- snapshots, provision your VM once, snapshot it, power off.

- clone a new machine from that snapshot (its still powered on, and do what you will with it)

Bonus points for attaching an ephemeral drive.

- provisioning is slow, thats why you have hot spares to clone from/use directly.

To minimise hassle, I use the very same infrastructure that I deploy on in prod. This means that there is no difference between prod and dev.

I understand the need to run stuff on laptops, but for me, its really not worth it. Using the same systems and sized machines as in prod makes life so much simpler. Plus I can hand over a machine to another dev really simply.