I have a MacBook and a MacBook Air (both fine laptops for coding) and I use mostly vim running inside iTerm (far superior to OS X's Terminal imho) for my IDE an

I have a MacBook and a MacBook Air (both fine laptops for coding) and I use mostly vim running inside iTerm (far superior to OS X's Terminal imho) for my IDE and C and Python are my languages of choice. When I write Objective-C w/ Cocoa, its X-Code all the way. It has a lot of excellent features. Socket programming with C would be no different than writing it in FreeBSD. I had some network daemon that I wrote under FreeBSD that compiled and ran under OS X with absolutely no modification. You have a full GCC build chain on OS X either by default or with the X Code package, don't remember exactly. That same code will probably also run under Linux, with slight or no changes; and those changes will probably be only about including the right headers. I love coding on my Mac. I generally used to code under FreeBSD at home (MacBook is my current `everything' computer) and currently code in Linux at work. Feels fairly similar between environments since I have a full screen terminal most of the time. I didn't quite gather what you wanted to do with virtualization, but Parallels and VmWare Fusion work great. You can also get a qemu frontend. If you have any other specific questions, don't hesitate.