Well that's the thing, those are Microsoft-centric programs and tools. There are equivalent open-source alternatives. If you're a professional graphics designer and you can afford the Adobe suite for Windows/Mac then by all means. If not there's GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and a host of office suites for spreadsheets, presentations, word processing like Open/Libre Office for free. And the console is a bonus if you know how to use it; it's faster for a couple of things and can be useful for system monitoring and troubleshooting issues. But you can pretty much do everything by pointing and clicking. Linux has some nice graphical interfaces(KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, etc.). I don't know, with Linux I feel like I'm more in control of my computer. I get to decide when updates are applied, what desktop environment to use, install it on as many machines I want to...And it runs great on old hardware.