I know a guy who runs OSX and windows at the same time. He just swipes left to slide windows on and swipes right to get back to OSX. Since Linus uses a macbook for development I assume you can do the same thing with Linux.
I installed vmware fusion to run windows and linux vms on my MBP. It works great and the swiping feature is really slick, allowing me to jump between desktops as needed.