I personally strongly prefer the Xbox controller. the PlayStation one feels wrong in my hands - whether it’s smaller or the angles are wrong or what, I don’t know. I appreciate it has the bells and whistles, but after gaming with one for a day or so at the behest of a Sony Stan who pitched the same things as you have, my hands were aching to get the Xbox one back.

GIMP is ASS!!
the worst, ugliest UI outside of Blender

As a design pro and someone who can get by in Linux (and knows his way around a CLI even...) I wouldn't recommend GIMP to anybody. It may be functional and even powerful but creatives aren't interested in wasting time on it when they have an elegant functional piece of software in the Adobe suite of apps.

OOo on the other hand, works fairly well - but for online machines it's pointless with the advent of the Zoho suite or Google docs. I wouldn't wanna do page layout in either though...