Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. For programming, yes, although I don't know if brew would be called "herculean". For battery life and ease of use, no. I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely mor…
Highly used programs: emacs, vi, Tex , latex, R, python, lisp’s, awk, sed. Yes No multimedia programs, cause I am a mathematician and for pdf I use pdftools; so no Adobe also; started with Slackware in 2007 after an abysmal windows period from 1991 till 2007; now I use openbsd and emacs simply rocks and is rock solid on openbsd.
I also think they're vastly underestimating the amount of stuff that needs to be configured on a new mac host.
My office workstation (Arch Linux) and home desktops/servers (all OpenBSD) can be installed and configured repeatably in ~5 minutes flat.
I literally have an ansible playbook that pulls in my dotfiles and installs a list of the packages that I want. That's a hundred times simpler than setting up my work laptop (Mac) for development, where not only do I have to install xcode dev tools and homebrew and the packages that I want, but most of the packages that I install need additional configuration applied to work correctly.