I'm not that crazy of a dev and there were at least 4-5 things that straight up wouldn't build in homebrew or lacked scripts. Basic GNU tools shipping with Mac OS X are vastly out of date (and in some cases buggy) due to GPL issues. I finally gave up after an afternoon of fighting getting GDB signed to be able to debug my Golang app and wound up installing a VM, adding a new SSH key to Github, setting up my dev environment and debugging it in linux in less time.
I used OS X because I had a MBA. When classes were over I decided to see how much work Linux would be on it given that Mac hardware and linux don't always get along. Basically everything worked out of the box though, minus a powersave script I ran.
Well, let's just say a lot of things don't work in linux either. Depending what you're building, sometimes it's reliant on a certain gcc version, or distro. Generally speaking, compile from source is usually the last resort if the package can't be found via apt-get, and occasionally you'll have to tweak the makefile or the ./configure script settings. Any time you're building something that isn't extremely popular, you're likely to get build problems.
So far, the ratio of build issues I've run into in OS X to the build issues from version mismatching in linux is approaching infinity.
egrep, gdb, and the few other things I fought last month in brew were not uncommon things. They were all things that were preinstalled in Ubuntu. Furthermore, I haven't had to build anything from source other than the projects I collab on in years.
I don't know why we're quibbling about this, it's generally accepted among Mac devs... it's a small price to pay if you like the OS X user experience. I haven't for some time now so the developer tools lacking and the competition of better linux DEs have tipped that scale. Trust me, I still love my MBA.
I used OS X because I had a MBA. When classes were over I decided to see how much work Linux would be on it given that Mac hardware and linux don't always get along. Basically everything worked out of the box though, minus a powersave script I ran.