If by just works you mean that you have to deal with abominations like MacPorts or Homebrew, then yeah, but personally I cannot deal with all that crap, so Ubuntu is the one that just works for me.
My laptops are just workstations to do day-to-day life stuff and a portal into my virtual computer world, where I'm working with remote displays, browser windows, command lines all over, and all that jazz. If it's anything remotely server related that needs to be on all the time, I'm likely not running it on my laptop anyway - it'll be on a linux box somewhere.
Or, if I'm on the move and it's really important to get a project done, a local VM on the little macbook.