Nobody can tell you if linux is right for you or not, that's an answer that comes from personal experience so the best you can do is actually try it and see if it does what you expect/need

Regarding the programs you listed, as far as I know, few of them can be run on linux using wine, photoshop at least seems to work very good on wine, 3ds max however does have several problems, counter strike seem fine with a few tweaks, visual studio works but it has several problems and wacom tablet not a clue to be honest. You can verify most of this info on the winehq site

Regarding touchpad and hardware support, most common ones of today distros should be enough for you and since you're thinking on ubuntu that should be a good choice

Beyond all this, if you'll be a happy linux user or not will depend on your own tests while using the system

Regards

I choose linux because I own a desktop not a server

Although you can have freebsd as a desktop system, things like the already mentioned (flash) are such a pain to get it working, also, even when it have had some improvement over the last few years, linux still does have better hardware support than freebsd.

To me the question is rather relative, I've used freebsd before in my system but to me linux is best suited for day to day use in a desktop system than freebsd

PCBSD have done some work on that basis (putting BSD in a day to day desktop system out of the box) but even that isn't as confortable as linux, to me at least

If we were talking about server systems then talking about choosing linux over freebsd or viceversa will be a more open disscussion :)

Personally I think that the fact that it works like an included file in the site template is what makes it kinda uncomfortable to use so either the template is modified or layout is changed a little bit to make forums wider

The profile part might allow users to change a few things forum wide like someone already said, posts subscription for one, maybe things like receive or not mail regarding subscriptions, and so on

not that it should turn into a bloated forum platform though because I like the fact that it is very minimalistic :)

not much of a gamer but doom 3 for me :P

bah I think that in time many things will change regarding new layout/site structure

Maybe most of what doesn't look good or make sense to this point is the result of doing so many changes and try to put them together

Anyway, if the changes are good or bad only time will say, from my point of view at least I think this changes are going well but surely there's a lot that needs to be done still :)