With homestead you have the various supporting systems already installed and running. Beanstalkd, redis, mysql, nginx (i think), php 5.5 or 5.6 (not sure) and you don't have to install that crap to your computer.

However, this is a half-measure. It's fine for people who don't know how to, or want to, manage their own individual virtual machines per application.

But, the way that we do it is by running a single virtual machine for each application that we build. In this way, each application can have a different version of PHP or different ruby versions for build tools, or whatever. For example, I have some applications that use specific versions of compass / sass.. I have an application that uses Rscript and other things like this.

Even if you wanted to, it'd be very unpleasant to have different versions of PHP on the same system (as an example). Having to install things like R or whatever else is needed for each application into your host environment. It's a pain in the ass and not worth the trouble.

It's not something that you can just do for free though. But, you already need to have some familiarity with Linux due to the nature of the job (I would recommend avoiding Windows as a development platform due to the fact that many tools don't work well with it, such as Ansible).

But, with a small amount of Linux knowledge you can easily add new applications and tools to your virtual machines. You can do something like:

vagrant up // bring up the virtual machine

then go to http://app.local/ (or whatever you want) to access the application that's already all nice and running.

Additionally, you can include virtual machines with your packages, etc. In this way, it's very simple for someone to set up a development environment so that they can help with your package.

Homestead might be a good first step, and is probably much better than just running code on your host operating system. But, to me it serves mostly as an intermediary step for users who don't know how to manage their own dev operations. With some experience with Homestead, you'll probably find yourself desiring a more sophisticated solution. At that point, you'll be fighting against dev-ops needs much much less frequently and things will become much easier.