There are two reasons I always have a Linux VM on Mac.

First, to replicate the production build environment I'm developing for.

Second, because Apple are always screwing around with things, e.g. the issue at the root of this thread (Berkeley DB must be installed manually on the lastest MacOS release prior to installing Perl); changing system perms in OS X El Capitan so the root user is unable to write to certain areas of the file system (hard to say "MacOS is UNIX" when root is not root ...), etc.

Then there is the issue you mentioned below, namely the ease of installing applications and libraries on Linux versus a laborious, convoluted or even frustrating procedure on the Mac.