I fully appreciate this, and the 3 applications u have listed are the same as the one's I currently have open.
I stay with Linux as my laptop is fully supported (i.e all devices work seamlessly across almost every distribution I've tried) and I generally find it faster and I guess I also like the lack of a price tag I as a student experience with Linux.
>Ubuntu ships without make, Ruby or Python
Since when does Ubuntu ship without make and python? Python 2.X has been included in standard installations for quite a few releases now. I also can't remember the last time I had to manually install make.
A barebones install might not have ruby or python. When I install it as a server I try to reduce the packages to a minimum and build up from there. I usually try to a network install as well (for Ubuntu or CentOS).
I would rather put on whatever I want later.
A default Ubuntu install I think has Python on board. Not as sure about Ruby.
Any time I set up an new virtual machine with some variety of Linux, I have to install some stuff to allow the VMWare extension to build. The exact requirements change from version to version, but it never worked out of the box (and I am not only talking about kernel headers here).
Actually, the latest version of Ubuntu seems to include that extension out of the box, which is friggin awesome!
By the way, I think that this is not a problem at all. I'd prefer a clean, lean system to Windows any day.
After that, both Linux and Mac are Unix systems and have package managers that can install stuff (third party on Mac). Personally, I spend most of my time in Chrome, a terminal and Vim. On OSX. Because I like it that way. But I could certainly replicate that same development process in some Linux distro.
Also, many Linux applications work just fine on OSX but not the other way around. So there is some argument for choosing OSX. Also, all that basic stuff like connecting to networks, having MS Office, etc. just plain works better on OSX. But to each his own.