Better VM Ubuntu on Windows 10 or VM Windows 10 on Ubuntu?
Put Windows on the VM. That way if you never have to worry that porting your Windows installation to a new machine will invalidate the installation ;) If you'll be using Ubuntu more often than Windows, having Ubuntu as the host will save you a lot of boot time.
Pro tip 1: if you have plenty of disk space, create the VM with a raw partition rather than a virtual disk. That will make the VM perform at near native speed.
Pro tip 2: Windows is considerably more of a resource hog than Linux (generally speaking - I'm sure you could configure a Linux install to use lots of resources if you tried hard). You'll need to give the VM an absolute minimum of 8Gigs for the VM to even be usable and min of 16Gig for decent performance.
If you are using Ubuntu as your daily operating system, then install Ubuntu on your physical computer and install Windows 10 as a guest OS in a virtual machine. The large size of Ubuntu's default software repositories makes it easy to install and upgrade the development software that you use every day. Because you're going to be installing a lot of software in Windows 10, the bare minimum for disk space is 25 GB1 2 (preferably on the SSD), and you will probably need much more than that, especially if you plan on installing Microsoft Visual Studio in Windows 10.
For example, let's say you need to use Microsoft Visual Studio. You can install the more lightweight Visual Studio Code from the default Ubuntu repositories with sudo snap install code --classic. It is possible to run Python, C, C++, JavaScript, PHP, Java, R and some other programming language code blocks directly in Visual Studio Code using the Code Runner extension. You can install some of your favorite Visual Studio extensions in Visual Studio Code, and switch from VSCode in Ubuntu to Visual Studio in Windows 10 when things get out of hand. You're going to need a virtual machine in order to quickly and easily switch back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows 10.
If you are planning to do graphics-intensive tasks in the VM, there is a distinct advantage in using VMware Workstation 11 or later over VirtualBox. In VMware Workstation 11 for graphics-intensive applications, 2GB of video memory can be allocated for additional workload processing power, compared to a maximum of 256MB maximum video memory in VirtualBox. VMware Workstation 15 and later supports virtual graphics memory up to 3GB. Your computer has a Core i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, so there should be no problem allocating 2 virtual CPUs and 8GB virtual RAM to the guest OS.
Why use Ubuntu for development?
The broadest and best development tools and libraries
The fastest route from development to deployment on desktop, mobile, server or cloud
The desktop of choice for developers at some of the world's leading technology companies
Lightweight to either run natively or in a VM, on a PC or a Mac
Ideal for any resource-intensive environment
Ubuntu is the world's most popular open source OS for development
Ubuntu is used by thousands of development teams around the world because of its versatility, reliability, constantly updated features, and extensive developer libraries.
If you're managing developers, Ubuntu is the best way to increase your team's productivity and guarantee a smooth transition from development all the way to production. Ubuntu is the world’s most popular open source OS for both development and deployment, from the data center to the cloud.
And, as the Ubuntu OS converges, these same applications will be able to run on desktop, tablets, phone and even on the Internet of Things — one application across Ubuntu's full range of devices.
Source: Ubuntu Desktop for developers