Linux is a bit problematic at the moment but I think it's coming out the other side of these problems soon. At one stage (around when Vista was out) things looked good for Linux. However, they have made some big changes. As you probably know there are lots of distributions. This isn't good but obviously there are a few popular ones. Mint is very popular now. The distributions tend to be forks of each other. Mint started as a fork of Ubuntu but now there are several varieties of Mint. One reason Mint was boosted in popularity is that Canonical (Ubuntu) brought in this Unity desktop. The idea being to make it good with touchscreens. I hate Unity and so do a lot of people. Gnome went from 2 to 3. Same thing in trying to make it touchscreen mobile device future proof but I think Gnome 3 is a little more acceptable to be honest. If you want a more standard desktop you can use Mint (they have stuck to the older theme of a desktop similar to Windows or OSX). My favourite is XFCE desktop. Nice and simple. Probably the closest to OSX.
It doesn't stop there with current issues. They are moving to systemd. I won't get into the details but it's explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemdI use Arch Linux which is cutting edge. That means I'm using systemd. At first a pain but I must say my system runs extremely fast now. Boot times are just a few seconds from SSD.
I could go on about other problems but what I'd say is Mint is best if you want foolproof Linux with standard style desktop. Arch is best if you know more about Linux. In other words Arch is the absolute best in my opinion but not best until you know more.
There is another issue that seems to come up but I don't find this to be a major deal. Some proprietary software is released as binary for certain distributions as though you absolutely need that, for example Centos for Modo. This isn't truly the case. It just means that there may be a few libraries missing from other distributions. It's usually not a big problem. You can just drag and drop the executable to the console and hit enter. If a library is missing, it will tell you it needs it and you install it.
This leads to the next issue and another reason why I use Arch. Linux can get out of date quite quickly and you have to upgrade to next version. Arch doesn't work like that. It never gets upgraded but rolls forward. You have to check at the site every so often to see if upgrades need a few configurations here and there. It means I can always run every most up to date app on Arch. I will never ever need to reinstall the OS.
As I mentioned, Modo is Linux now. This is a huge boost.
As for Photoshop, I actually have the demo of CS6 on my Windows system to test since I heard about the licencing change. I was considering getting a version of CS6 and just sticking with it forever, like you say with CS5. Of course Adobe doesn't want you to do that hence the change. I can see why. Photoshop CS6 is very comprehensive. What more do you need? However, I compared to Linux alternatives and to be honest there is simply no point in Photoshop if you are using Linux, at least for most people.
My Arch system is pure 64 bit. You can install Windows apps via Wine and many work fine. However, it gets more complicated on Arch. I have no 32 bit libraries and can't be bothered to sort that out. In fact I did at one stage mess with this but it was a lot of trouble and I had some problems but on something like Mint I think you should be able to install 32 bit Wine even if it's 64 bit Linux. Wine is actually being developed for 64 bit but 32 bit Windows apps work best.
