I flipped over to Macs from Linux desktops (laptops) because I was tired of reconfiguring things every 6 months or so. This was also ten years ago, but there is something very comforting in having a dedicated system that is well configured and tested that also has a good command prompt.

What? Why would you suppose that? Developers don't like hassle any more than non-developers do. We're still people with work to get done.

That's why I quoted "configuration hassle"

Because you don't think they are? I do.

And you didn't say why you suppose more developers use Linux than OS X. My experience is the exact opposite.

Why? Configuration is a sysadmin or at best devops area. In my experience, most developers want to write software on a machine that gets out of their way.

They may need a particular flavor of Linux to test on, but those are typically server builds anyway, so not great for everyday computing. That's what solutions like Vagrant or cheap cloud servers are for.