Hoolean

You've hit the nail on the head. I have been in a very similar situation, using OS X for development on a Macbook Pro for 3 years also.

You are absolutely correct when you say that everything is 'not-quite-right': package managers are absent by default; Linux tools are sometimes hackily modified to work on Mac; additional tools have to be manually downloaded.

It's possible and the interface is generally fairly slick but everything feels like a hacky solution to a problem that is just not there with Linux.