For all your OS X coming to Linux, a word of personal advice. Use a distro with KDE, Kubuntu is great for beginners and install ubuntu-make (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make), a command line utility that installs your dev environment.

If you feel a bit more adventurous and want the all of the newest Software try Manjaro-KDE.

Why KDE?

KDE has a traditional Desktop experience, that can be tweaked in every way. It is much more polished and all the other Linux desktops and it uses Qt5 as it's base - so the team doesn't need to develop the widget toolkit and can focus on the desktop. Lastly gtk apps look much better in KDE than Qt apps in Gnome.

BTW: I was a long time Unity and then Gnome user, so I know what I am talking about. I switched to KDE this summer and never looked back.