Dev work in the uBlue family (and yes I use bazzite for dev) leans heavily on distrobox (think development containers). Took a bit to adapt but now I think it's the ducks nuts. Because you decouple the dev environment from the main, immutable OS you get a lot of wins, especially if you work with a lot of different projects as you can setup distroboxes specifically for each. AI code that only works with specific drivers / libraries / python with instructions only for Ubuntu or Arch, no worries, make up a distrobox, when you're finished archive it and spin it up later if needed. If you're only working one project on say LTS or something it's going to be much less of a win, but for the flexible developer it's a godsend.

As to doom emacs or whatever, I have a post install script for distroboxes that sets up my preferred environment for the big 3 (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu), it's not hard. Very much a kill your darlings philosophy.

ETA Because of this workflow it really doesn't matter what the host OS is, so it may as well be something I can game on, and I'm fond of the Fedora relative stability with sharp, but not bleeding edge.