I have had the same discussion with my team mates who use ubuntu. Me being a front end dev and needing graphic tools, means i have to use mac. But to get the ENV up an running it took a while. However, now the environment is exactly the same. When they do apt-get I do brew install. I really miss your point regarding "ability to solve problems effectively" . If you are proficient with a mac, and you can achieve the same tasks more quickly, then setting it up is the least of your problems. I agree with what you said regarding windows, as getting the tools up to date there is a nightmare, but OSX is really up there, and works fine. No real reason to run everything in a VM and waste memory