[fdomig]

Honestly, nice if that works easy for you when using just developer tools on the terminal or a text editor. As a web developer, though, you might end up using more than that. A Mac offers so much more commercial applications that just do not exist on any Linux distribution.

Gimp is no replacement for Photoshop and Inkscape is not replacement for Illustrator, ...

Btw, mostly everything you install with `apt-get` can be installed with `brew` as well (MongoDB, Elastic, nvm, etc.).

[Freak_NL]

> Gimp is no replacement for Photoshop and Inkscape is not replacement for Illustrator

Nor is Photoshop a replacement for the Gimp, or Illustrator a replacement for Inkscape. They are not cheap clones forever playing catchup to the commercial packages, but mature tools in their own right. Sure, the FOSS tools might miss some of the advanced features the proprietary tools have, but for web development both of them offer plenty of features — and they are free to boot!

Whether or not one can replace the other is mostly a matter of what you are used to. No alternative is going to satisfy you if you've intensively used Photoshop for a decade.

[contingencies]

Definitely. I prefer Illustrator for multi-page documents requiring irritatingly precise typography, and Inkscape for SVGs. Although I pretty much mastered Photoshop perhaps 20 years ago, I've gradually come to loathe it and happily use GIMP or Darktable instead.

[laurentdc]

Honest question, why should a developer need Photoshop and Illustrator?

I thought .psd mockups and HTML slicing were a thing of the past, and vector work (logos, etc) should be done by a graphic designer. Not to mention most icon/graphic assets can be provided by Bootstrap or FontAwesome.

[pmontra]

I still receive some .psd but Gimp opens them and I can slice the parts I need and save them to png or jpeg.

No vector logos yet, but if they give me a .svg I can view it directly into the browser.

[pmontra]

As a web developer I never had to use Photoshop. A graphic designer does that for me. Gimp or anything way less powerful is enough to crop the images I receive. The same goes for Illustrator.

A much better example would be the native clients for GitHub or tools like those. I use the web ones and I'm happy with them.

[SunShiranui]

Nothing can replace anything, but if you're looking for Photoshop alternatives, check out Krita. It's mainly focused on painting, but I've found it to be much nicer than Gimp.