I really wanted to get into Ubuntu. I write a game book, and would have been happy to make a transition from Word/Acrobat/Photoshop, but Gimp was just a deal-breaker. Long ago, Mac used to have a a suite called ClarisWorks that I remember fondly. It was simple, but very stable and intuitive. I never followed it into AppleWorks. But, for as good as Apple is at UI, you would think they could make an incredible word processor/image editor combo. I was hoping to find an improvement in Ubuntu. OpenOffice is fine. But Gimp is aptly named IMHO.
The wonky part for me is that there are three separate windows, where as in Photoshop it's all one window with toolboxes that you can drag around. So if you minimize The GIMP, you have to actually minimize all three windows. This is a hassle. Plus, it's sometimes hard to make the windows stack in the right order.
Hubski is hosted on Linode, so I get a tad of Linux time, but I'd love to be more familiar. I have a ThinkPad that just crapped out, and although I have another Windows laptop on the way, I am going to see if I can rescue the ThinkPad and run Ubuntu on it. I really did like most aspects of it, and I'd like to keep a foot in that camp.