OSNews

Since I'm up I'll take a stab at your editorial here. Seems to me that despite all the market saturation Linux is claiming, it remains a "nerd" OS for all but the most mundane desktop tasks. While I'm willing to grant the emergence of projects like Lindows (err, Linspire . . .) and Lycoris as evidence that non-geeks can, will and are using Linux, there is an entire class of people who tread a very broad line of being quite well versed in computer technology. The problem is that what they know is Windows. For the sake of argument we'll call these "power desktop" users. They know what their computer is capable of, but could care less how it achieves it. Thus, they'll pay $480 for the best Radeon-based video card around, but they want to be able to plug it in, start the computer, run a .exe file and start playing their games. Right now, Linux does not allow that. Those "power desktop" users would have to learn a whole new set of skills to tweak their Linux computers, while they grew up knowing how to do it already with Windows. Thus, game developers focus on Windows primarily and in enters the chicken-and-the-egg problem.