With what Truerror said above, dual-booting would probably be ideal, depending on why you're wanting to use a virtual environment. If it's for testing and cross-compiling, personally, I find it easier to just dual boot. Doubly so if you have an extra hard-drive laying around.

Are you considering a VM just to do testing on each linux distro, or for other reasons? If it's for testing, I could see how that would be handy to see where the folders are and which libraries are included by default. If you're considering just using a VM for another linux distro just to get the updated libraries, I would recommend just updating the libraries you need manually instead (or if this is for making different packages, you're likely going to want to just include the libraries with your game, I would think). I personally wouldn't switch distros just to avoid updating libraries periodically. Unless you're really hard pressed for disk space, most libraries are rather small, relatively speaking, and bloat shouldn't be too much of a concern.

GCC you can update for any distro, I believe. It's also relatively easy to update (especially if you use synaptic), even if the stock installation doesn't have the latest version. I don't have a ton of experience with VM's but, if it's for testing, you may not get the best results, performance wise.

One little note, if you do dual boot a windows drive, Windows is going to bork your grub loader. So, either install windows, then reinstall your linux side, or you'll need to look into how to repair Grub. There's a grub fix program somewhere out there, but I don't have a link to it handy at the moment.

In my setup for cross-platform development I'm using both virtualization *and* dual-boot (iMac + VMware). Even though i also use SDL2 there are a lot of cross-platform issues to deal with, it's super convenient to just push a git commit to the virtual machine and verify that the build is ok. But for performance testing I rather dual boot and profile in the native environment.

I would strongly recommend using a VM for what you're trying to do. VirtualBox, VMWare, they're all good. LXC is not a VM: you'll run into video driver grief sooner or later if you use it like one. Also, you can run Windows in a VM. You will want to make sure you have plenty of RAM and extra disk space.

You may find there are video driver issues inside the VM: it's rare, but it does happen. For full video driver testing, you will need to use bare metal. For everything else, VM is what you want. Video driver == OpenGL support. You want not only bare metal, but a selection of Intel, AMD, and nVidia hardware of different generations. If it works in the VM, it'll work elsewhere.

I develop on Ubuntu exclusively (it's in my job description): the current dev release is always a rolling release (so it has the current leading edge kernel, video drivers, toolchain, etc) but it's different enough and incompatible enough from the latest stable release that I have two separate systems for testing backports from dev to stable. Upgrading a stable system with something not in the archive (new toolchain, for example) is enough to possibly destabilize it and you're going to get real sad after a while.