Debian. And I don't understand how people manage to get anything done at all without a package manager and (binary) repository. I've recently had to help a colleague set up development environment on OSX and it was pure torture.
And yeah, once you get a hang of tiling window managers everything else just looks silly.
Can you elaborate on the advantages of a tiling window manager? I like them, but once I pass about 3 windows, things start feeling cramped and I can't really get anything done because there are things I don't care about competing for visual attention.
I use wmii, so this might not apply to the other tiling WMs (although it does seem to be similar from observing other people), but here goes:
The main advantage of wmii to me is that I can always get to my destination window with a single keystroke. I don't have to grab the mouse and I don't have to shift my focus to the window switching process itself like it happens when you Alt-Tab in Windows / OSX. I switch between windows a lot so it was a major annoyance when I used to work on Windows. Maybe for someone with a different work style it would be a lot less important.
Most of the time I have one maximized window per "virtual desktop" so there's really no competing for attention issue. But when I do use multiple ones (e.g. for multiple IM clients) I really enjoy the fact that I don't have to do the layout manually (using mouse, again).
Finally, it might be silly, but I just realized that "imperfect" windows layout (where there is unused space between windows) bothers the hell out of me. OSX is particularly bad in this regard (and I've noticed other people bothered by this as well).
Maybe I just need to learn to set one up correctly. It sounds interesting.
I hear you on the OSX "space waste" thing. Windows has the awesome Win+Up/Win+(Left/Right)/Win+Shift+(Left/Right) shortcuts that I dearly miss when I'm on OS X - being able to move windows around and maximize/restore them with the keyboard is fantastic.
Give Slate [1] a try, it's a little bit of a pain to set up initially, but it lets you easily assign hotkeys to your prefered window locations.
Personally I've also got PCKeyboardHack [2] and KeyRemap4Macbook [3] setup to disable capslock and remap it to a 'hyper' key (command+option+control+shift) so that I can assign my own key combos without having to conflict with other software.
Tiling manager - Amethyst ( https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst ) is port of xmonad for Mac OS X.
Binary repository - brew cask lets you distribute Mac Apps as binary files. Furthermore in boxen ( http://boxen.github.com/ ) they did some work with adapting brew to distribute all software, even command line tools as binary packages.
Homebrew developers are doing god's work but I wouldn't compare it to agt-get.
Yeah, if you sweat for a couple of days you can turn your OSX (and even Windows) into some remote resemblance of a linux. But what good parts do you have left after that?
I get CentOS people always telling me their distro is better. Would love to know if as Debian users we're getting cheated out of something awesome there :)
I don't know that CentOS is necessarily better, but I haven't used Debian enough to make a really valuable judgement there. It's certainly good, though.
yum is a very capable package manager, and Redhat's distros have been very well supported for a very long time. The flexibility of having both Fedora (bleeding edge, you'll probably cut yourself, but can always get the latest goodies) and CentOS (LTS, you know it's going to work properly) is really nice, too.
And yeah, once you get a hang of tiling window managers everything else just looks silly.