You mean un-unix or un-linux?

Which parts?

That's a fair statement. I think there were two big ones: - the service registry/init system - filesystem paths

The second is minor in the grand scheme of things. It only affects my user account but the first one was greatly annoying. My history is in AIX/HP-UX before going Linux full time so I'm familiar with the smit/sam model of doing things but have you ever tried to actually usea traditional unix/linux model for managing apache in the default OSX install? What about LDAP? It's weird and annoying. Launchd? Seriously?

The Mac I have is in the living room for family use so I have not "worked" a lot on it. I didn't use much of the default tools and relied more on macports for unix stuff. I was asking because I am considering a Mac to replace the windows laptop with cygwin I use for dev. I use Linux for servers but I am from the world of Solaris I also had HP and Irix workstations at different jobs in the past and a NeXT at home.

I know the defaults are all Linux oriented these days so any different flavor of unix is always a little extra work if the filesystem differs to much. Macports also adds a little twist to that.

I found launchd verbose (and the xml is not even that self descriptive) and I am not sure its worth the departure from the usual way of doing things but I didn't think it was so bad. I only did a few simple things anyway.

These seem like things I don't rely on too much on a dev laptop anyway. But I now believe I have to investigate a bit more before I buy the new machine. Thanks

In my case I find myself fullscreening a vm if I can't change to base install. I have too much muscle memory that I can't implement on other os:

Cmd-t new terminal Cmd-w new browser Cmd-e new vim session Cmd-f new file manager window

Then I have my ctrl-shift keybinds for terminator and my vim keybinds. I'm especially unproductive without the cmd-t option available and the terminator keybinds.