I'm curious which tasks you find easier? I was a hardcode Linux user before I got Mac, so I had to try it. Four months later, and I never boot into Ubuntu anymore because everything works equal or better on OSX.
Good question. There is quite a lot of software (dev tools) that are trivially installed with aptget, but not so easy (if possible) with homebrew.
I am mostly retired now, but I am working on a commercial product, and still write the occasional book, and advise consulting customers - that is my excuse for experimenting with LOTS of open source projects. If it is easier to check something out on Linux, then I take the minute to reboot.
That said, when developing I mostly "live" in IntelliJ (mostly for Clojure and ClojureScript, a little for Java and Javascript) and running IntelliJ on OS X (or even Windows 8.1) is nicer than on Ubuntu(because of trackpad issues).
I found that using brew to install GNU tools and replace Apple's FreeBSD tools really made my transition a lot easier. Now build tools don't randomly break because of some unusual command line incompatibility between OSX and Linux.
Annoyingly at the end of the day, I just want a Unix OS with working drivers, and that can run photoshop. Linux doesn't quite cut it (no matter how much I love it).
Hm. Which tools aren't easy to install with homebrew? I find it has pretty broad coverage of most of the command line tools I need, and it's reasonably easy to compile other packages from source if you need them.
Of course your needs are different from mine. Just curious.
OS X doesn't support Valgrind or GProf. That's enough for me to keep a Linux VM around. Additionally, I've found that software is often easier to build under Linux.
Am I missing something?