Typically text looks fine, possibly a bit small, but icons etc which have traditionally been simple icons look really tiny. It is possible to argue that retina/hidpi displays really do not work very well on ANY platforms except “native Mac” yet, which is true. Well, yeah, that still doesn’t work very well, and hasn’t since retina Macs appeared. Naturally we want to bring these over when we started using our retina Macs. On the graphic side, Linux had many offerings, but certainly Gimp and Inkscape can and should be considered very powerful offerings when it comes to pixel- and vector editors.

Additionally, if you even dreamed of developing for iOS, you need a Mac. They are both Unix’es and we still run Linux on our servers.

So the last decade a lot of us Linux developers have bought Macs, and even if we can’t always run Linux on our laptops very well, we have made sure that most of our tools run equally well on OS X as Linux. If you wanted a computer with a “retina” screen (where pixels are so small you can’t see them) and a decent trackpad, the only real option was a Mac computer. The last decade it seems most computer manufacturers focused mostly on price, leaving most of the professional and enthusiast market to Apple. Gimp and Inkscape are products of the Open Source and Linux revolutions that have taken place the last three decades. While they might not cover absolutely everything Photoshop and Illustrator does, they are very advanced and capable tools available for an unbeatable price (free).

I love Gimp (a pixel editor, think Photoshop) and Inkscape (a vector editor, think Illustrator) and have been using both for many years. Gimp and Inkscape on retina Macs do not work!

Is inkscape font still in pixels