In my on going effort to do things outside of my comfort zone I purchased a Mac Pro last month. I've used windows professionally my entire career and I've run Linux as my main OS at home since 2000. I've never spent anytime on a Mac though, until now. For the most part it has been a smooth transition. The fact that it is built on a BSD core means I can always open up a terminal and feel pretty at home. MacPorts has also helped a lot in that it allows me to run some of the same apps I'm used to. I guess I haven't bit the bullet completely because I still use Firefox as my browser, and I run a lot of webapps. However I do that so my environment feels the same whether I'm at home or at work. The following are just a couple of things I've had to deal with.
1. The biggest thing is the keyboard differences. I didn't realize how much I used ctrl+c,ctrl+v until I had to switch to option+c, option+v. Then there is the way 'del' key works. It works more like a backspace in certain apps. Also 'del' doesn't do anything in finder. To delete something you have to do option+backspace. Which really throws my keyboarding off. And something I absolutely couldn't live with was how home and end behaved. Home and End go to the beginning or end of the document rather than the line. This annoyed me to no end. I finally found this helpful website that made terminal and firefox behave like I expect.
2. OS X has file attributes that don't show up in terminal. I found this out the hard way. I had shared a folder into a virtual machine but couldn't for the life of me get the virtual machine to overwrite any of the files. The VM (Virtual Machine) though it was read/write and terminal said it was read/write for everyone. I finally did Get Info on the file in Finder and saw that it was 'Locked'. Unchecking that fixed everything. This probably happened because the file was originally copied over from an NTFS drive where the file was set to read-only and OS X was trying to do the right thing. There a couple of tools that allow you to see this information in terminal that I'll use next time I have a file issue.
3. Something not at all related to Mac but rather a Vista issue. My VM is running Vista x64 so I can do some development for work. I have to run my copies of Vistual Studio 6.0, 2003, and 2005 as administrator to make them work in Vista. But I couldn't for the life of me get them to open a shared drive in the VM. I wanted the files to live on my native drive and then be mapped into my VM. However this just didn't work. If I ran a non-administrator application I could access the files just fine. This caused me hours of frustration and I finally turned off UAC (User Access Control) and the problem went away. There really should be a way to do this without turning UAC off but I can't find it.