For the sake of making sure everyone knows that dev can be done 100% on Linux, here's what I use every day:
1) Sublime Text 2 (free, but I paid for a license)
2) SQLyog running in Wine (not a free program)
3) Filezilla (free)
4) Git (free)
5) Firefox with Firebug and FirePHP (free)
6) Standard LAMP stack (Apache, MariaDB, PHP) (free)
7) phpMyAdmin (free)
8) Sqliteman (free)
9) Grunt (requires Node) (free)
10) Sass (requires Ruby) (free)
12) Dropbox (free)
13) TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt (free)
14) Composer (free)
I do run Photoshop and Illustrator in Virtualbox 5.0, but since I'm not a "designer", I rarely fire this up anymore. Obviously Photoshop and Illustrator are not free, but Virtualbox is.
So, it can totally be done, and the distro you choose is probably not important. I like Ubuntu because I started in with it in 2006, and I just like it because it's familiar. Use what you like ...
