I work on this at Stripe. There's a lot of reasons:
* Local dev has laptop-based state that is hard to keep in sync for everyone. Broken laptops are _really hard_ to debug as opposed to cloud servers I can deploy dev management software to. I can safely say the oldest version of software that's in my cloud; the laptops skew across literally years of versions of dev tools despite a talented corpeng team managing them.
* Our cloud servers have a lot more horsepower than a laptop, which is important if a dev's current task involves multiple services.
* With a server, I can get detailed telemetry out of how devs work and what they actually wait on that help me understand what to work on next; I have to have pretty invasive spyware on laptops to do the same.
* Servers in our QA environment can interact with QA services in a way that is hard for a laptop to do. Some of these are "real services", others are incredibly important to dev itself, such as bazel caches.
There's other things; this is an abbreviated list.
If a linux VM works for you, keep working! But we have not been able to scale a thousands-of-devs experience on laptops.
* Local dev has laptop-based state that is hard to keep in sync for everyone. Broken laptops are _really hard_ to debug as opposed to cloud servers I can deploy dev management software to. I can safely say the oldest version of software that's in my cloud; the laptops skew across literally years of versions of dev tools despite a talented corpeng team managing them.
* Our cloud servers have a lot more horsepower than a laptop, which is important if a dev's current task involves multiple services.
* With a server, I can get detailed telemetry out of how devs work and what they actually wait on that help me understand what to work on next; I have to have pretty invasive spyware on laptops to do the same.
* Servers in our QA environment can interact with QA services in a way that is hard for a laptop to do. Some of these are "real services", others are incredibly important to dev itself, such as bazel caches.
There's other things; this is an abbreviated list.
If a linux VM works for you, keep working! But we have not been able to scale a thousands-of-devs experience on laptops.