I get the joke, and it was the first thing that popped in my head too. But in all seriousness, OS X is Unix as well, and can do pretty much any Unix based task that GNU/Linux can. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the one you already own.
Thus why macports for me was king. HomeBrew tried to hard to not replace your user space, though I haven't looked at it in a long while. I'm on Linux everywhere now.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-fo...
In general, I don't think I'd ever give up Linux. It's a hacker's OS, by and for hackers. Being able to pick apart and fiddle with any portion of, from the kernel on up, is a wonderful, empowering feeling, and something that has proved useful both personally and professionally over the years.
I didn't mean any slight against GNU/Linux; I use it every day (and I don't mean on a phone or tablet either). But I also have used Macs for stuff that works better on a Mac, and Windows for stuff that works better on Windows. There isn't a "Best OS" period, because every use case is different. There's only "best for the job at hand".
As the other commenter stated, it's an X11 thing. Despite the prevalence of applications that run under X11 and the XQuartz availability, the native UI under OSX is Quartz which handles everything under OpenGL I believe....?
Edit: Seems it's still read-only. If you need write support that badly (why?), there's always Paragon: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/
It probably wouldn't be there except I'm sure most of the expertise and code had to be developed for their imaging and partitioning products.
I think the only things I run frequently for development that don't come with OS X and aren't free or open source are Sublime Text and Paw. You can certainly use vim/emacs/TM2 and curl scripts if you want.
Were I using Linux, I'd be using Sublime Text, and, well, curl scripts again. I'd also be jumping off a cliff after about two days of dealing with desktop Linux's horrific regressions over the past decade.
OS X's native development tools (Xcode, llvm/clang) are free, and most of the tools you use in Linux are either already there, or a "brew install" away.
Well, that's one I can personally tell you I've had problems with in the past.
> even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k
And also this one. That's even back around the timeframe I was actively doing Perl development while using win2k.
In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM.
After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/d69f5b0cee13102a9167
So, I've satisfied your request, "Try using cpan to install basic modules like MySQL". I guess that means you admit OS X "can do pretty much any Unix based task that GNU/Linux can"?
That said, for just about any project I've ever worked on within a GNU/Linux ecosystem, I could have easily adapted it to Mac if that was my chosen platform. HTML is HTML, JavaScript is JavaScript, so for today's web-centric projects the OS you're running doesn't matter as much. Even languages like Python don't really care what's under the hood.
Of course, if you're doing Linux kernel development, or targeting a GNU/Linux deployment, then a Mac isn't the best idea. :)