I would advice MacPorts.org instead of homebrew. With package managers such as macport and homebrew, you can run on Darwin freedom/open source programs, includ

I would advice MacPorts.org instead of homebrew. With package managers such as macport and homebrew, you can run on Darwin freedom/open source programs, including a lot of GNU software that you also find on Linux. You can also compile those freedom/open source programs yourself, or get binaries produced from them (eg. http://emacsformacosx.com http://emacsformacosx.com). The alternative, is to run Linux binaries on a Linux system, with two choices here: have a linux box on the network, or use a virtual machine in your MacOSX system. I'd advice Virtual Box, which is a freedom/open source x86 virtual machine provided by Oracle. In terms of user interface, you have coarsely three classes of programs: CLI, X11 and native GUI (Cocoa). For all the CLI commands, there will be no difference of user experience between a Linux binary and a Darwin binary of the same program (apart from the differences of feature in the host OS, it may be significant for some system tools). Some freedom/open source applications have multiple backends, including a native Cocoa one, and in this case, it is indeed a very good idea to compile it on the MacOSX system to use the native Cocoa user interface. emacs is such an example, with http://emacsformacosx.com http://emacsformacosx.com. But the best is to use a X11 server on MacOSX. https://www.xquartz.org/ https://www.xquartz.org/ Then you can run both the freedom/open source programs compiled on MacOSX and Linux programs running either in a virtual machine or on another machine on the network, with all user interface inside X11 on the MacOSX screen. Of course, you can run all the KDE programs here or there. And you can also change the window manager, if you don't like quartz-wm which decorates the X11 windows like Cocoa windows. Notice that virtual machines provide a (graphical) screen emulation too, but in general I find it slower and more inconvenient to use, than running the X11 server on MacOSX.