As a cross platform open source developer that uses Mac OS X and Linux about the same (Mac OS X on desktop, Linux on laptop) I don't see what's so horrible about Mac OS X in this regard. At worse, it's the same. I don't prefer either for programming (I do prefer Mac OS X for other things, though).

Well, developing using native toolchain is horrible. Because of legacy gcc 4.2 and unstable and often broken clang. At least about a year back it was the case. No. Scratch that. It is still the case. I just remembered helping a coworker hack some open source package to make it compile with clang. We lost an hour or so, completely unnecessarily. Would have taken him 30 seconds to apt-get it on linux.

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?

Okay, our use cases are very, very different. I mostly do Go now and used to do lots operating system development and embedded work. For Go, your compiler complaint does not apply, and for embedded work you need to build or install a cross compiler anyway. There are some cross compilers which you can get with apt-get, but in practice for the work that I do, there are no distribution provided tools, and you need to maintain your own toolkit.

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.