I wouldn’t know about the costs of either Adobe’s rent or Starbuck’s coffee. I say that as someone who was in the first Starbucks store in the world before the counters were installed and the coffee roasting machine was hooked up. That was some long time ago.
Right again: as I said, “used to it” is the key. Once I was used to GIMP, I never was sufficiently motivated to use PS for anything other than putting out CMYK images for printing. Then for at least a decade that’s been pretty easy in GIMP.
I’ve never had a problem with compatibility of graphic hardware or nearly any other computer hardware under Linux. The one exception of compatibility is my Canon scanner. It works fine under Win in VBox but Canon has always been pretty disdainful of Linux. My Epson scanner works great with Vuescan running in Linux. My 4 core 8 thread i7 is long in the tooth now but still usefully swift in Linux.
I’ve used virtually ever version of Windows (exception Vista) since before Windows 1.0. (Most folks don’t know about the era when MS’s way-late delivery of Windows 1.0 caused it to produce the “Windows Run-time System.”) Since Win98 I’ve run Windows under virtual machines–often running faster and more stable than native Windows. Win4Lin was terrific running W98–faster than native and rock solid.
I still use Windows to run tax software, WordPerfect and rarely to wrestle with PS. Graphics hardware never got in my way with PS–I’ve just never had the patience to “get used to it.”
When I got a Canon R5 I had trouble with CR3 files in RT and went to DPP4 in Win10 in my VM. I gave that up pretty fast. Too ponderous a UI. Dealing with images from a network drive was also ridiculous with DPP4 (as it has been since I first used earlier versions in 2002). So I gave up on DPP. I really like RT. It has been pretty unstable with crop mode R5 images and for a while RT was trying and failing to read EXIF info and tanking but it now works well with full frame CR3’s from the R5 so I’ve been sticking with FF photos and using exiftool with it’s GUI to get metadata from specific images–in Linux. Fast and stable as usual.