I haven’t tried fink or homebrew, but ports works in a satisfactory fashion. It’s funny, because when I first wrote that sentence it was “I use macports and loathe it”, but it’s mostly because of the compile times (which is why I use debian/arch not gentoo on my workstation/servers).

Having said that, if I need to do real work (scientific computing) I am practically required to jump over to my ubuntu partition (dualboot).

Super spam: Packets of Knowledge: OSX Tips and tricks.

If you’re a git user checkout http://gitx.laullon.com/. And http://code.google.com/p/macvim/ if you’re a vim user. (You can also build it with brew). And I use http://www.boastr.de/ for customizing multitouch stuff.

Oh, and install “Visor” for a Quake Like Terminal. It comes in really handy…

Install X11 to get some more unix tools from apple (although X11 itself is a dead-wrack old version that no one bothers using). Maybe install XCode (I think version 3 is still free?) to get some nice Developer tools.

Install GeekTool. Way to waste hours writing little code scripts that do nice things for you desktop.

Python, Perl, PhP, Apache are all already pre-installed – if you dont need any of the newer versions features, stick with the older but apple-supplied pre-installed ones.

Take a quick look at AppleScript and Automator. Automator does some nice automatition (who had guessed) and Applescript is a PitA first (obnoxious pseudo normal language) but it can be a _really_ good glue-langue to mix bash and perl into some nice mac gui.
Have a look at the way apple stores preferences (.plist files) and how to tweak some things… http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/02/top-50-terminal-commands.html
Use TimeMachine. When you dive down into the deeper levels of os x, and toy around with unix tools, sooner or later something will get messed up. (Some unix tool replacing an apple tool that has a slightly other syntax for option, etc.).

At one time, I had a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone. Now I have none.

I am both happy and sad, which no emoticon can express.

I use Macports on my 2 PPC machines (a G5 Powermac tower and an old Luxo lamp styled iMac) only because Homebrew does not support PPC. I rarely run into issues with it, although I had forgotten how long it takes to compile code after using so many Debian based Linux systems.

I have installed Homebrew on my Macbook Pro, but have barely used it other than to get “pianobar” (a CLI Pandora client, highly recommended) running on it.

I missed middle click for a long time, and on my G5, I use a bluetooth mouse and have middle click mapped to spaces. Never found a good way to use it on my MBP, and no longer care.