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> Note that I don’t currently consider Windows a viable alternative. For the work that I do (Rails) and tools I use something *nix based is the best choice for me.

For a long time, it has been my workflow to almost never develop on the host machine. I find Virtual Machines to be preferable for a lot of reasons. Am I unusual in this regard?

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Perhaps you are but you shouldn't be. When I was still using a Mac, this was exactly what I did. The #1 benefit IMO, is being able to create a filesystem and OS isolation/independence layer that let's you easily switch host OSes without too much hassle or thought. One can easily switch from Linux to Windows to MacOS or even migrate their work to the cloud without too much effort.

I've recently adopted a similar approach. I have a virtual machine running the same OS and version as the target production machine. I'm using QEMU and connecting to it via ssh.

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