[balls2you]

Install VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, give it most of your RAM and hard disk space. Now run Linux on that. That's your best bet for sticking to Linux for most of your work.

You can use browser on the Mac if you want to be able to use the latest and greatest firefox/Chrome but for coding and software nothing beats Linux. All the OS X brew/ports etc are just not good enough compared to apt-get.

You can run the VM using VirtualBox in background mode too and then just ssh to it using the Terminal.app or iTerm.app on OS X.

Copy-paste works really well on iTerm so you can copy-paste links from your OS X browser like Firefox/Chrome to the ssh terminal and use it in case you download software using wget/curl sometimes.

For email, Thunderbird/Mail.app both work really well on OS X and that should be good enough unless you want mutt, which you can then use from your Linux VM.

Most likely your production environment is Linux, esp. if you're in a company that is giving you Macs so most likely web development. Even better if you mimic your production environment in your VM and develop on that instead of developing on a non-standard environment like OS X and then hoping stuff works in production. (Tons of devs do this and it makes no sense.)

[wrighty52]

Personally, I'd suggest using something like Vagrant instead - more lightweight in my opinion, in terms of being able to instantly destroy & create a new one with 2 commands.

Although, saying this, there's no reason the OP can't just install Linux over (or alongside) OS X.

[johnward]

I'm curious as to what makes Vagrant more light weight as it still needs some type of VM software.

[ecaron]

Its more the discipline that Vagrant creates in letting you repeatedly generate the same environment.