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IMHO, the ugliest part of local environments is the OS, and fighting with interactions.

But VMs can abstract away most of this, especially in a learning environment where performance isn't a primary goal.

Then you can have a known-good set of instructions that doesn't have to include messing with whatever Apple/Microsoft/Ubuntu changed recently.

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Docker was getting us pretty close to this until the M1 Macs came out and our Intel CPU presumptions blew up.

Docker has plenty of ARM images and I think they also have built in Rosetta support now to run x64 albeit with lower performance.

Well, those OS differences taught us to write (or strive to) portable code. It also taught me to better appreciate strengths in different operating systems over the years.

Absolutely! But in a learning format, the student probably needs to be focusing on the task at hand.

Learning to paper over OS errata isn't as generally useful as, say, groking multithreaded coding models.

Yes, there are environment quirks. Yes, you'll have to deal with them. Yes, you can look up documentation when you run into those situations.

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