Just to address one part in detail, what "layer multiple third party tools" means in practice is: install brew, install gnu-utils, and add the relevant director

Just to address one part in detail, what "layer multiple third party tools" means in practice is: install brew, install gnu-utils, and add the relevant directory to $PATH. It's fire and forget. I'm quite confident you can do it with ports, or even nix if you really want to. I know it's subjective, but it doesn't feel like Apple is being "actively hostile" here. It's just configuring your system to be different from the default. I don't even remember the steps in detail (like what does brew call the gnu utils?) because I did it, once, four years and three laptops ago. I actually did it seven years ago as well, but that laptop was stolen. Edit: also, I didn't "flock to" OS X, I eagerly bought a G5 as soon as I could afford it, in 2003. I learned Unix on workstations (Sparcs mostly) and my Yggdrasil Linux partition was always a poor substitute in comparison. So when Apple started selling workstations? and they were Macs? Yes please!