I disagree on the MS Office <=> LibreOffice and GIMP <=> Photoshop part. It's (in most cases) not a downgrade, just different.
the only real problem with LibreOffice is it's *.doc/docx support. Thats it. MS Office has it's problems and it's not perfect in any way. For normal users LibreOffice/OpenOffice is just fine. I accept *real MS Office pros* complaining about the FLOSS Suites - but I've only seen like 10 of them so far. The average user at the places I work have only basic MS Office skills. The only complain about Libre/OpenOffice is, that they *look somehow different*.
The departments at my work got rid of VBA-extensions and -scripts (these were horrible anyway) - so there isn't anything thats really *needs* MS Office...
Besides of the doc and xls formats. Don't blame the FLOSS developers here - these formats are (undocumented) crap anyway.
As an closed-source alternative for MS Office I would also consider Softmaker Office. It's faster and handles MS-Office documents better than LibreOffice
As for Photoshop:
Yes, it is much more advanced than GIMP. I wouldn't get the designer gyus at my office to switch to GIMP. But hey, these gyus are pros and they use Photoshop professionally. RAW-support etc. There are many things GIMP can't handle - so it's not really an alternative to Photoshop in pro-level
But the normal users? They all want Photoshop because they heard it's the best available - get it (mostly cracked with a trojan-installing key-generator) and use it like MS Paint...
As for the technical aspect: GIMP is much better than Photoshop - it's faster, not bloated as hell, needs much (!) less space on harddrive and in memory. Oh - and Adobes Updater just sucks (especially for OSX). Out of 10 updates 1 fails...
Are there any Linux SysAdmins out there that use CentOS or Ubuntu, because I got questions...
it depends on that you want to know. I never used CentOS but Ubuntu and Debian.