the advantage is that you have the same software running on your server as you do on the desktop. i can't tell you how frustrated I've been in the past trying to deploy some code i wrote only to find out I need to upgrade half the libraries on the system for my code to work.
most people agree that it's good to develop on the platform you will run in production, but they take it the opposite way (run outdated server software on their development environment).
most people agree that it's good to develop on the platform you will run in production, but they take it the opposite way (run outdated server software on their development environment).