I like Unity and I consider it a cheapish version of OS X gross general style guidelines. I like full screen application idea, distraction free globalmenu. Hiding maximize/minimize/close controls as an option. MeMenu it's great. Non intrusive notifications. And so.

But left taskbar and being unable to integrate Docky with Compiz effects beauty it's a continuous pain

Or use best of both worlds

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/bootstrap-ma...

Or MacPorts [1], or Homebrew [2]

[1] http://www.macports.org/

[2] http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Quite not the same (full distro repository vs small amount of ported apps). Easier and useful, though.

Small is not quite exact. MacPorts has 8,000+ ports. Homebrew has 1600+ formulae but this is an awful metric due to the distributed nature of its development (2000+ forks, with some very specialized) and it is barely two years old!

Take the package count for Debian as a reference: http://ftp-master.debian.org/users/joerg/pkg-nums