Mine is currently reporting 1.4

I thought about giving you a quick list, but in 2013, it's far easier to just show you. (Or rather, let you show yourself.) Install VirtualBox and give Mint with the MATE desktop environment a spin, `apt-get install` any dev tools or new versions (what version of Python does OS X ship with these days?) that aren't already there. (Mint is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu currently is, in my opinion: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php)

Ubuntu (and other Linuxes) has better package management, more UNIX tools by default and better tooling for certain types of development. For people who target Linux it's easier to build binaries for it.

It's also open and you're able to change it, tinker with it, mold it. You actually know where everything is. It's generally a lot cleaner as well: Apple litters the entire filesystem with stuff you don't know where it came from, or what they affect.

I believe faster boot times are also a factor, some people can get their Linuxes to boot nearly instantaneous. Perhaps battery life as well.

I use OS X and am happy with it because I don't demand any of that to be productive/enjoy my system, but I can certainly enumerate things I don't like about it and would rather have the "native" FreeBSD approach or a Linuxy one.

Some OS X tools try to make up the difference (homebrew, like you said it), but like any race where you start behind you're not gonna win. Especially since the other competitors have decades of experience.

OS X is basically a tradeoff. Some people aren't willing to trade away too much, or have personal choices which are more important to them than to you or me.

That said, I'd try to get Linux running natively on a Mac if I had that inclination, not under Parallels or some other emulator. That just feels the opposite of "clean" to me.

> Sorry if this sounds ignorant, but it's not meant to be.

No need to apologize for the ignorance you are seeking to dispel.

1. apt-get. While mac comes with several unix tools, they are old and limited comparing to what comes with linux. Many grep or find options are missing for example. Setting up new linux account the way i like takes one command and few seconds on ubuntu, while installing dev software on mac is way more complicated. Possible maybe, but its a waste of my time. Also compiling from source is great way to introduce subtle bugs related to exact version of your libraries and env config - which are terribly hard to debug or google for. Another example: Sshfs is terribly broken on mac, while works flawlessy on linux. Same for many other tools. 2. Software i develop will run on linux. Developing it on mac will create several problems and surprises, which lead to more bugs. From this perspective any deviation from linux is bad. 3. I love kde. Its highly configurable, working exactly the way i like. Mac feels very limited in comparision. 4. Its easy to find people that know every detail of linux, and can help with any problem, even if it means debugging kernel or digging into library syscalls. I've solved many application issues this way. Even though some of such tricks work on mac, people learned them because of openess of linux, and this is natural env for experimenting.

I've tried mac few times and always run back to (k)ubuntu. Its great hardware and its definitely better than windows, but all lowlevel "unix stuff" is not a match for ubuntu.

It is easy sometimes to assume that all versions of linux are the same. Some linux programs that work on one distro dont necessarily work on others or dont work with the same effectiveness. One key example of this that I run into all the time is valgrind. It works on OS X, but I often get errors due to some action that I am trying being unsupported.

Ignoring disliking apple and closed source, OSX is pretty much out of the running just because I can't put a tiling window manager on it.