but it would be neat to sever my dependency on Micro$oft and go FREE with Linux someday.
Why do people get it in their head that Linux is the only free alternative? What about ReactOS, or FreeBSD, or OpenBSD? and honestly, the people who use those operating systems aren't hyperactive zealots which ought to make them a lot more attractive.
Maybe some day some group will make a SuperWINE that is less like trying to put a diaper on a buffalo for games etc sort of like a DOSBOX for Linux, but for Win32 games vs DOS. Or even better... the game manufacturers start to make games that are LINUX READY for the larger more popular distros!!!
There are two good reasons that popular (I mean, things like, say, Just Cause 2, or Crysis, etc) aren't released for Linux. First, there is of course market share. A lot more people run windows, and making a Linux variant of the game makes the test matrix nearly infinite, as they now have to make sure the proper libs are installed, and they have to choose those libraries, and they have to make sure that if they need a newer version of the library some other application isn't using the currently installed older version, and if so they have no choice since Linux doesn't afaik have any support for Side by side library installations. Add to all that the fact that various distributions have different default libraries and different versions of those libraries released via their update mechanisms which could very well break any lib dependencies of something like a game, the fact that 3-D acceleration is about on par with windows 95/98, in that you have to fight with drivers and applications to get anything but software rendering (not helped by the fact that Driver manufacturers realize there is no point in fully supporting 3-D since that isn't typically what a Linux user wants to do anyway).
Linux is an awesome server OS that has a excellent CLI, but it's desktop environments leave a lot to be desired. For one thing, none of them an agree on it; Unity? Gnome? KDE? LXDE? Some might argue that it's about "choice" but it's more about Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
Linux is not a replacement for windows, and will never be. There will not be a "year of the linux desktop" in the foreseeable future. They are different Operating Systems designed by different groups of people originally to perform completely different tasks and with different design goals. Linux would be a far better contender on the desktop if it wasn't for it's community constantly resorting to blame-shifting to account for bugs or omissions, and they of course fall back on the "It's free so you can't complain" argument sometimes, or "it's open source so you can fix it yourself". Yes, I could, but I need to software to do a job, I'm not using it because I'm bored and need a task to do.
In any case, when it comes to games, either settle for the games already available for Linux (and despite what you note, plenty of spectacular games have been developed for it, just so long as you aren't after ridiculously over-the-top graphics). Plenty of indie titles run on it just fine, although I have found that a lot of them require you to do some funky things due to conflicting lib versions. it's either that, or accept that Linux is not a Operating System that is conducive to playing games. It's an awesome Server OS, though (which always makes me wonder why there are "Server" variants of the popular distros). My laptop is currently running a LAMP server and serves a subdomain of my website, and I can hardly tell, aside from it being generally warmer than usual.
I can see a SuperWINE type project coming to be,
No. WINE is designed to allow programs written against the windows API to run on Linux. And for that purpose, it works perfectly fine. It has a few bugs but most of those are either corner cases or programs trying to call a Windows API function incorrectly and WINE reacting differently than the Windows API function. It is not designed to allow things like DirectX to be used on Linux. That was not it's goal. It is not a "Windows Emulator" (like say WoW (Windows on Windows) on windows itself), that is right in it's name, in face (WINE Is Not an Emulator). It is a "compatibility" library, which provides Windows API services to applications that expect it, as well as providing the functionality to start those programs. There will
not be a "superWINE" the concept is in fact ludicrous. WINE itself is a spectacular and constantly evolving compatibility shim that does what it was designed to do 99.9% of the time. To suggest that a new project will not only do what WINE does but also allow for the use of DirectX and native windows OpenGL support, Windows Audio, WASAPI, and who knows what else merely to allow people to play games for windows on Linux is just plain silly. Linux is not for running Windows Games and never should be. if you want to run windows games, you run windows or wait for a port.
Warranted, this is coming from somebody whose favourite games all run on both platforms (Minecraft, Emulation). The difficulty of course comes with the fact that newer games use the hardware to it's limit, and because each Operating System deals with hardware differently so to would the games, which would overcomplicated things.
As a side note, calling Microsoft "Micro$oft" is not cool unless you are an overweight grubby 17 year old Linux zealot whose hands have a constant coating of cheetos. Either that, or you frequent slashdot or are one of Stallmans concubines. Generally I would assume any persons approach to an issue would be to find the method that provides the most flexibility and does it in the easiest fashion, particularly since for a lot of scenarios, while the Microsoft solution might cost money (let's compare say IIS to apache), it might also save money; if you already know C# but know nothing of PHP, for example, ASP.NET is going to be a lot easier to learn and work with then diving into Apache and learning PHP from scratch. Of course it won't hurt to learn PHP, but if you need that web server up "yesterday" you don't exactly have time to be poring over man pages and PHP/MySQL documentation. naturally the converse proves true, it will be faster and more cost-effective to use a LAMP server if you know PHP and nothing of C# or other .NET languages (which isn't atypical, given that Mono is regarded as "evil" purely based on it's choice of license).
What needs to happen with Linux, is they need to stop infighting about pedantic crap and arguing about philosophy and "get 'er done". You cannot sell even free software purely on philosophical merit, at least not to everybody. Essentially that is what seems to have happened with FreeBSD. How often do you hear somebody extoll the virtues of FreeBSD? Not often. But they exist. Linux zealots are the loudest to the point that it seems people feel it is the only existing free alternative, when it is neither the only one nor likely to be the best, and even if it was, one cannot know that without exploring the other options.
In a way this sort of illustrates the problem with zealotry on either side (windows, or Linux, or any of the other systems (OSX, FreeBSD). The reason is that in order to properly argue against, say, Windows users, you need to learn enough about windows to create that argument. And by the time you do, it's too late,
you are now a windows user. Same with Linux. I see a lot of ignorant arguments against Linux as much as there are about Windows, In order to properly argue against "linux users" you would need to learn about Linux, and again, by the time you do it's too late and you've become one yourself. Warranted, you can of course subjectively compare Operating Systems, but if you go in with the goal of "finding faults" with the system, you are doing yourself a disservice.
EDIT: wow, 15,000 posts?
