Out of these 2 programs, which image editing program would you prefer to use? Is there advantage with Gimp aside from it being free and open source? I've used Gimp before and it felt limited.

Now I currently have an Adobe CC student subscription for $199 a year until the end of 2016, but I'm considering on going back to Linux later on with a rolling release distribution, and Adobe products only work on Windows and Mac. Now I love photoshop, but I think subscription based software isn't a fun thing, I only have this current subscription for school since I actually need half of the Adobe products for it. In Photoshop, I've learn a lot this past semester taking the advanced class knowing some of pretty advanced features that I didn't learn before, such as having smart filters and actions even. If I had known about actions much sooner, I could have saved time resizing an entire gif file before, but now I know.

However, there are some people here that use and prefer Gimp, and if I go back to Linux, I'm not going to be able to get Photoshop back and I doubt it's compatible with Wine.

So out of the two, which software do you think is the best for image editing? And does Gimp have any other advantages from Photoshop that I may have overlooked?

GIMP has no advantages whatsoever. Also you can get CS2 for free.

But can CS2 run on Linux?

Paint.net

Gimp has a better UI for creating emblem art and stacking multi-layer transparency, but I prefer PhotoShop for most actual photographs.

I prefer Photoshop over Gimp, but neither are bad

I use GIMP for all of my artwork, abominations and avatars/titlebars.

Works pretty good when you know how to use it, but then again I'd probably say the same after using photoshop for a while.

But jesus $199 annual subscription? I'd pirate it until I learned to use it proficiently and actually have a career needing  it at least before spending that much.

Just use photoshop while you have it.  It's already paid for.

I use photoshop.