As someone who runs OS X day to day, but still loves a traditional unix desktop to get work done, I can see where you're coming from. In my experience you have

As someone who runs OS X day to day, but still loves a traditional unix desktop to get work done, I can see where you're coming from. In my experience you have a couple of options for getting the best of both: 1. You can run XQuartz full screen, and can even run a nice wm like xmonad. This isn't perfect, but isn't entirely bad. 2. If you have VMWare, you can just run your workhorse of choice in a convenient vm. Full screen VMs under 10.8 are actually pretty great when you're just on the laptop - you can just three finger swipe from OS X into bsd/linux/whatever and then back again. I personally like the VMWare option, since it means that OS X gets to do all the power management and all of that, and there's no fiddling to do in the virtual machine to make things work with the hardware. And you totally own the vm environment, so you can do whatever you like to it.