I am currently running a Windows laptop and before I switch over to Ubuntu I'd like to know a few things.
I don't have much firepower in terms of hardware (it's only a Compaq CQ-61 Laptop) but I'd like to know if with Linux at it's side it will be able to perform these tasks:
Try it. Seriously though, nobody here (or anywhere) can know how you do your programming or what your games are or what you consider to be a good basic video editing workflow. We're all different. We all expect different things.
The only way you'll know if it works for you is if you try it out.
A dual-boot or Wubi install isn't hard and shouldn't hurt Windows. Give it a few days (it might not even take that long to work out that there are show-stopping issues) and if you like it and can do all the things you want to do, stick with it.
On the issue of web development (my $DAYJOB), the programming side of things is simple enough. Everything I use is cross-platform in some way or another (SublimeText and a lot of Fabric and Git scripting).
But Adobe formats are an issue. Designers still use them so when they're foisted off to me to be turned into websites, I still need the right tools. GIMP isn't there yet. I keep a unnetworked Windows XP virtual machine alive for the sole purpose of Adobe software. Performance is fine on my desktop but I do have 24GB of RAM.
You might struggle on a laptop but I guess the same is true under Windows.
Programming in Linux is very amusing. You have all platform choices such as desktop programming, embedded (on AVR/ARM), and web (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.). In web programming, try to see this list of web programming IDE on Linux Basic Web Development IDE/Editor like Dreamweaver?.
Yes you can get all of this using a simple unity desktop(Ubuntu 14.04) I doubt about gaming (it all depends on your graphic card and other hardware) but since I had the same doubt's and I am also doing web development (with java) it is awesome and fun to do with Ubuntu as it is very fast and unique in its own ways, the only thing is you need to do good amount of research on any command or any change you want to do with your system it is not like windows where you can do everything on clicks.
