Everything is a tradeoff. There's so much more going on in Mac OS X (especially Lion) than a typical Linux distro that you are literally talking apples and oranges.
For my money, Mac OS X makes the right set of tradeoffs to give an overall good to great user experience, even at the command line. It gets enough of the right things correct that for a developer/hacker/tinkerer, they can take it from there and add whatever else they need.
For me, Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) has been amazingly useful. I can install any of the popular Linux distros and configure them anyway I want without worrying about Mac OS X's installed apps and libraries. A killer feature: because Mac OS X and VirtualBox share folders, I can still use all of my Mac OS X tools (editors, IDEs, whatever) with Linux. And thanks to Chef, I can spin-up specialized configurations in just minutes. Having access to apt-get is cool and all, but being able to create specialized, configured environments using Chef cookbooks is faster and way less error-prone.
All of this (and more) and I still get all of the benefits of Mac OS X native applications, superb driver support, etc. And all of this on 4MB 2009 MacBook Pro.
For my money, Mac OS X makes the right set of tradeoffs to give an overall good to great user experience, even at the command line. It gets enough of the right things correct that for a developer/hacker/tinkerer, they can take it from there and add whatever else they need.
For me, Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) has been amazingly useful. I can install any of the popular Linux distros and configure them anyway I want without worrying about Mac OS X's installed apps and libraries. A killer feature: because Mac OS X and VirtualBox share folders, I can still use all of my Mac OS X tools (editors, IDEs, whatever) with Linux. And thanks to Chef, I can spin-up specialized configurations in just minutes. Having access to apt-get is cool and all, but being able to create specialized, configured environments using Chef cookbooks is faster and way less error-prone.
All of this (and more) and I still get all of the benefits of Mac OS X native applications, superb driver support, etc. And all of this on 4MB 2009 MacBook Pro.