Once upon a time our production servers might have also been Unix. And developing from a Unix system was therefore desirable.

But these days our production services are almost certainly running on Linux (and probably Docker). Mac/Unix will have incompatibilities with this.

But you can get away with a non-Linux local environment because: * most server software doesn't use APIs that differ between environments * most OSes are well supported by Docker- which may work using a seamless Linux VM.