My current go-to environment for development is the Manjaro Linux distro with the i3 tiling window manager and the fish shell. Other than that I tend to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux quite a lot. Especially since I am stuck with Windows at work and partly at home (I’m a gamer). It is quite easy to start a WSL session and get things done. I don’t have to bother with a virtual machine in that case. WSL2 is just around the corner. That’s good news since it will finally be using a real Linux kernel.
Speaking of virtual machines, when I do use a virtual machine I prefer VMWare Workstation over VirtualBox. VMWare Workstation has proved to be more stable than VirtualBox for me.