I use a Mac for developing. I'm thinking of using a VM with a linux distro to develop in my Windows machine. What's a good distro for developing Node/React apps?

Ubuntu

Any distro will do. All have the same tools to choose from, so it all comes down to personal preference and experience.
If you are not familiar with or new to Linux, then any flavor of Ubuntu will be fine, or Linux Mint.

Also, I would recommend NVM to manage your node.js installation on your Linux machine. It will make your life a lot easier.

I'm experienced with linux, but for servers. Worked with ubuntu, centos and red hat. I'm mostly asking cause I've almost never used it for desktop, so I want one that looks beautiful (or at least can be tweaked to). Seen so many posts of different flavors, that I'm a bit overwhelmed. Want to choose one that looks beautiful, but it's not hipster enough not to have a pacake manager for the dev tools, or hard to install like Arch

Also, if possible I'd like to avoid Ubuntu. I used that for a while and the GUI just make me sick (or maybe it has another gui other than the default gnome that i hate so much(?))

@rephiscorth
I personally use Solus OS. It's an independent Linux distro that uses Budgie for desktop environment. It is fast, simple and very nice / elegant. So if you are already familiar with Linux and you know how to compile what you need, if it is not in the packages repository, I recommend Solus.

@rephiscorth have you tried Ubuntu 17.10? Before, Ubuntu used its own DE (Unity) but since 17.10 it ships with a modified GNOME. And you can always install the default gnome session with 'apt install gnome-session'.

On a vm you want something with a light de. Try Linux Lite.

The distro doesn't matter. I personally would go with ubuntu if I was you, because most of the tutorials you'll find online and most of the tools will have a tutorial for ubuntu. You can change the "out of the box" look (I think there's even a mac theme).

If you've ever worked with an other distro, go with that.

None. It's not possible to develop node or react on Linux.