While I'm (we're) critical of the regressions when it comes to UI performance, switching to linux means giving up an entire ecosystem of apps, completely changing workflows, and in some cases depending on the kind of development that one does, making our jobs impossible.

That's why for me Linux is the only sensible choice of platforms. All the other platforms means giving complete control over my tools to a single company.

You're about to give it up to Red Hat, with systemd taking over everything, whether that's your cup of tea or not, that's what's going to happen.

Yeah, soon Vim and Emacs and even GCC will be integrated with systemd!! Resistance is futile.

So much this. I've settled on elementaryOS 0.2 (based off Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) for all my development, staging, and production environments, being netbook, notebook, All-in-One desktop, Mac mini and all my VPS servers. Software package consistency is a invaluable, and you don't even have to give up on the looks:

https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion

to me, Ubuntu 14.10 is still very rough. there are so many inconsistency everywhere: shortcuts, software's ui, etc...

take a simple example: usually Ctrl Q (cmd q on os x) means quit. try doing on os x will quit the app 9 out of 10 times. on ubuntu? not really.

Wait... You are not running Elementary on production servers are you???

That's ironic, considering the major wave of OSX adoption was due to linux-oriented developers who found it easier to keep working with their linux ecosystem on OSX than on Windows.

Not major, just vocal in these circles.

On a laptop, the regression in battery life switching to Linux or Windows is just a no-go. Also, it's not like Linux is famous for "just working" when it comes to suspend/resume.

Ubuntu 9.04 onwards no big issues with suspend to ram. Hibernate to disk can be problematic if someone uses 'guided partitioning' as the swap space is sometimes a little small.

Hardware: Thinkpads (T41, X60, X200) and Dell Latitude (E5420), currently Debian Sid.

I've also had no trouble with this, lately, though I have no idea how well that generalizes to others' experiences.

An alternative upgrade path would be (any distro) + Pantheon DE (from Elementary OS). Very Mac-like, it helped me with my imaginary transition pains.

Soon thereafter, I did a tour of the usual window manager suspects and ended up with i3 <3

Arch Linux + Pantheon DE was very buggy the last I checked. I ended up just installing ElementaryOS and regretting/missing having pacman. After a while I just gave up on eOS Luna and switched back to Arch Linux with a very minimally themed Cinnamon DE.

So I agree that any distro + pantheon would be great for those looking for an OSX-like experience in Linux, but it seems the reality is not as straightforward. PantheonDE doesn't seem to be developed like KDE/Gnome/XFCE are -- i.e. with a distro-agnostic approach. Hence you're sort of tied to eOS if you want to keep any level of sanity while getting it to "just work". That was counterproductive in my experience.

I second this, I just switched my MBA to Xubuntu and I'm loving it.