i'm using debian as my primary o.s.
My weapons are Modo, Blender, Gimp, inkscape, Scribus, Rawtherapee, Geeqie, XnviewMp and a little tool i've written in Lazarus for keywords.
Sometimes i need photoshop or illustrator for converting my old assets to an open format (from ai to svg and from psd to tiff), so i use a win 7 vm
running on virtualbox.
Easy? No!
But once you are done, you have a fast, stable and free system!