While 2D stuff will mostly be handled by the CPU, I don't think anything recent should struggle. I can spin and process huge print-quality images in realtime on an iMac with a quad-core i5 without it breaking a sweat.
Raw files from modern cameras are big, so eat up memory and there's probably a fair amount of caching to disk, so plenty of memory and an SSD. The software needs to be optimised to make the best use of the CPU and GPU, no idea what's that like with Linux, Photoshop and Affinity use exciting-sounding things like Metal acceleration on GPU. Raaaaaawk!