In any case it's all dumb blind loyalty the vast majority of the time. And that applies to Linux, Mac, and Windows. You can't have a discussion about operating systems with 90%+ of people because everyone just defends their favorite and facts are distorted to suit those preferences. It really is just about useless to have a discussion about operating systems as "substantive" or "meaningful" discussions about the subject are about as rare as unicorns.
But if you are Apple pet developer then you'd just use XCode/XCode projects/etc for all your needs. And would be very happy with that.
And well, not using the native toolchain, and using something like mac ports feels like I'm under cygwin all other again. No, thank you. I love 13" Air, but as a development environment Macs are quite broken.
Plus that home key on the full desktop keyboard... If you are linux+mac user, you know what am I talking about :)
Curious, what package management system are you using to install libraries/packages? Ports? Fink? Homebrew?
Same applies to libraries, you can get everything you want with apt-get, as long as you only want things for your architecture. If you need them for another architecture, you are out of luck.
For operating systems you use virtual machines. I use the host just for running my text editor and for my Unix environment needs. All operating systems I've worked on (Solaris, Windows, BSD, QNX, some other real time embedded stuff) have their own tools and compilers used to build the system.
MacPorts, Fink and even Homebrew are FUBAR, I'm glad I don't have to use them.
Without qualifiers, that statement is meaningless. Perhaps you mean it's horrible for some devs? (Millions of others are doing just fine with Visual Studio).
For regular users, dropping them to Linux will be like replacing your mom's car's controls with the controls found in an airplane cockpit(command line) or playing "who moved my cheese ?" with the Linux desktop. Granted, everything is moving to the web these days, so why not just give them an iPad or a Chromebook?
1.) Grandmothers and the like who just want to read their mail and check the news.
2.) People like me who can and will use 4 + 2 + 1 + 0,5 hours to customize it over the course of 6-12 months to have an almost perfect working environment instead of living with a slower OS without virtual desktops.
The only thing I can think of that needs tinkering is some online banks that require applets to work, but then again even Windows doesn't come with Java preinstalled.
I know lots of people who successfully installed Ubuntu that don't know what a boot sector is but are still happy with it. (After all most people use web apps anyway.)
And man tell me where should I have gone to get any information about why my _wired_ Ethernet connection wasn't working on Mac when it worked everywhere else?
[UPD: I'd give iOS apps 2/5 on consistency scale, Android, Linux and OSX 3/5, Windows 4/5].
I can't say I've really touched Python at all, but as a relative newcomer to the Ruby world I found getting RVM set up and functioning properly on my Mac to be a complete non-issue.
It's also true that Homebrew (and Macports, but not Fink) are doing something fundamentally less ambitious than the main Linux package managers: it offers a simple dependency system and scripting for compiling stuff, not directly installing the end product.
Now I don't really expect linux volunteers to do this, but equally I don't really expect any linux distro to provide a coherent business desktop because they are not talking to their "customers" in the same way that their competition is. And the business desktop is a large market, if a bit unsexy.
Well, sure, but (unless I am mistaken) that is no longer on the topic of the Linux desktop.
My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is that stuff does break, but it's inscrutable how and what to do about it, whereas at least on Linux there is usually some way to do something about it if you're tech-savvy. If anything gets borked in Windows, it's wipe-and-reinstall time; back when I used it full-time I probably did that once a year on average.
I find OSX to be poor for package management, though. I've gotten so tired of headaches with installing and managing updates of stuff, and badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now. In that aspect, it's Debian that's centrally managed with real release-engineering and integration tests, whereas OSX is an anarchic mess of 3rd-party software that nobody's responsible for integrating and testing.