Please give it another go. I think you're right, thrt was a fluke.

Why? Never hear of it. What makes it better conpared to other popular distros? And how does it serve the need of Windoofs refugees better?

Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It's upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you're used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I've been extremely happy with it.

As you can't ditch it for alternatives, I suggest:

• KVM, kernel-based VM for better performance. See this vid about setting it up: https://youtu.be/BgZHbCDFODk Licenses (and cr=cks) should work, judging by the Adobe forums, but you'd have an overhead with Windows running, so you'd greatly win by stripping everything off from it, up to disabling system services or even their Explorer DE (like some gamers did with Win Aero in W7 times, killing it while the game was running).
• Wine (Proton) directly or via Bottles\Lutris\Steam increased it's emulation capabilities and performance in the previous years. It works for highly demanding games, talks OK with my various discrete v-cards, skips the Win10 overhead, shows CC apps not unlike other programs, but it can cause random bugs, apps not communicating right to each other, and activating it may be not as straightforward. Before starting to rely on that, it's better to test your exact worklfow, tools you use, etc.

You'd be probably drown in a question of what Linux distro to choose, considering there's stuff like AV Linux or Pop_OS being recomended for media design. But you'd easily hop from one to another as you go, so it's better to install something as simple as Mint first, and try Adobe workarounds there before moving next.

If you have specific hardware, I'd say that Wacom-like graphic tablets work like they should (tried several pieces, adapted some touchscreen devices, nearly out-of-the-box on modern Linux), but for something else, like controllers that need to talk to your programms in some special way, you'd better google their compatibility or try it yourself. Making a passthru of inputs to VM or taking it's inputs by Wine wouldn't usually be a problem, problems start when this piece needs a specific Win\Mac-only driver, and they can, especially if they are old, have a temper of a feral ghoul. I know that there are a lot of linuxoids creating in different kinds of media, so I'm pretty sure there are some answers on the web, at least for the same manufacturer, series or kind of hardware.

Are you able to run windows in a VM for your software?

Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don't want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.

Yeah, I agree. Especially since there's SO much information out there that'll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn't good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It's best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.

It’s more than that. They want training data for their LLMs. With enough training data, they can train these models to do office knowledge work themselves, removing the need to employ cubicle drones at all.