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As someone who runs OS X day to day, but still loves a traditional unix desktop to get work done, I can see where you're coming from. In my experience you have a couple of options for getting the best of both:

1. You can run XQuartz full screen, and can even run a nice wm like xmonad. This isn't perfect, but isn't entirely bad.

2. If you have VMWare, you can just run your workhorse of choice in a convenient vm. Full screen VMs under 10.8 are actually pretty great when you're just on the laptop - you can just three finger swipe from OS X into bsd/linux/whatever and then back again.

I personally like the VMWare option, since it means that OS X gets to do all the power management and all of that, and there's no fiddling to do in the virtual machine to make things work with the hardware. And you totally own the vm environment, so you can do whatever you like to it.

>>> but if you want more flexibility in your environment, there MIGHT be a 3rd-party tool for it, and it may even work, but if it does, it'll cost $20. It's like the world of Windows about a dozen years ago. Maybe in a few more years, this situation will improve.

If this means that almost every free program i download from the internet wants to install some crap along with it, i'll gladly pass and pay up.

A) You can use CTRL-s just fine, and B) that's far more to do with legacy terminal cruft than anything related to UNIX. Mac OS X has all the UNIX that Linux has, albeit with much more non-UNIXy stuff on top of it.

Or, to put it another way: Darwin and Linux today are far, far closer than either of them are to most UNIXes in existence.

> I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal?

This works just fine in Mountain Lion.