I'd like to be a power user, not luser in OSX-land

There's a book called http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596003562 users. There's tons of Command line stuff available on line like Terminal secrets etc. try http://www.usingmac.com/2007/11/18/leopard-tweaking-terminal-codes

Update from my Mac reseller salesguy - though you might appreciate it. Credit to Twitter @chesazeb:Best advice I can give: Learn the keyboard shortcuts. It will make you FLY through the OS, and folks will be impressed when you rarely grab the mouse. Make sure you turn on full keyboard access to buttons, widgets, etc. to be able to navigate through dialogs without mousing. Check out AirMouse for remote controlling the Mac mini with an iPod/iPad/iPhone - acts as a keyboard, trackpad, and scriptable remote all in one. Speaking of scripting, AppleScript is awesome, powerful, and can automate nearly anything. Integrates with shell scripting and vice versa. Can script almost the entire GUI. Check out Automator to build quick and easy automated workflows. Tons of freely downloadable workflows available online. If you have it hooked up to a TV, check out the Kylo web browser for the best TV web-browsing experience around (makes GREAT use of AirMouse) Backup your VM within the VM, using whatever Windows backup tool you like. Tell Time Machine to skip backing up your VM files Since server is just client with a few apps added on, you can easily use it for gaming, internet, etc. without any additional steps. But don't forget to download the server admin tools: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1419 If you have a library of Windows games, check out Crossover Games http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/ , it's a version of WINE tuned for gaming designed for Mac OS X This probably goes without saying, but for Mac gaming, get Steam http://store.steampowered.com/ Sharing printers and files really couldn't be simpler, you'll see For a large amount of storage for backup, file hosting, etc. at a decent price, get a Promise SmartStor DS4600 and fill it with 3TB drives. Slice it up to allow between 2-3TB for a Time Machine backup volume, and the rest for general file storage. Or however you want to slice it up after you've got the Time Machine volume carved out. Macports is good, Fink is OK too, they both have strengths and weaknesses. It's entirely possible to run a GNOME or KDE session on top of Darwin w/out using Aqua at all. Set the User preferences so the login screen displays as a username/password entry form, then log in as >console w/ no password to get straight to the CLI, no GUI. From there, you can startx after everything's been installed and configured. Windows/mac integration resource: http://www.macwindows.com/

P.S. a soul patch on me would be a very sad one indeed. I shave maybe once every 2 or 3 days. And it's all wispy. Think Lao Tzu.

Big +1 on the keyboard shortcuts! That's great advice, overall. Kudos to chesazeb.

mhoye: You can actually install homebrew without root, putting it in your home directory somewhere. Quite the advantage. (But I'm actually a Fink person myself, love me my Debian tools!)

If you get interested in the server administration aspect, http://images.apple.com/education/docs/Apple-ClientManagementWhitePaper.pdf is the place to start. It was written by an Apple systems engineer in his free time with cure pictures of his pug, but eventually got wrapped into the Apple official dev world. It's overkill for what you want to do, but hey, it's the world of tinkering! As a mac system administrator, I just use http://www.bombich.com/ to back up our servers. One partition for the boot drive, and for the data. No reason that SuperDuper won't continue to do the job though. For more system administration, http://www.afp548.com/ is the place to be, though it leans more towards the server side than anything else.

Macports, not homebrew. Ruby people are not to be trusted with root.

Great tips here, the only one I didn't see is under the heading of - Desktop customization Get http://growl.info/. It's a system notification api. The closest windows analogy I can make is to the little dialog boxes that pop up from the task tray, but done in a beautiful, elegant, and skinable way. Most cool non-Apple produced programs (text editors, file transfer software, mp3 players that aren't iTunes) use it, and there are http://growl.info/documentation/applescript-support.php hooks in it.

Some other things that are useful: http://perian.org/ is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. http://hints.macworld.com/ from MacWorld can be useful. http://korrekt.org/page/Mac_OS_Installation_Guide_for_Linux_Users and a much older http://v.cx/2008/11/mac-setup guide might help.