Main stream gaming has always been a large problem in Linux, the lack of support from any of the large gaming companies has turned allot of people (read: gamers) away from Linux as there just isn't the same level of support for gaming as there is for window. I for one know several people who would use Linux but don't as they like to (mainly) play (main stream) games.
Now there have been projects like wine to help fill this gap, but it is often a struggle to get things to work under it, if they can work at all, making it more attractive to just use windows.
It has been great that allot of indie games coming out over the past few years, mostly being fully cross platform. Which is nice, but without the main stream games we are never going to capture the gamers from the windows community.
There is also the option to dual boot, but I find gamers tend to spend most of their time playing games and switching between OS's just to browse the web or watch a movie is a pain so they would rather just use one OS.
All this makes it great news that Valve have almost finished their work porting the steam client and source engine to linux
Which was originally announced back in 2010. But not only that but they seem to be preferring Linux as a gaming platform over the newer version of windows (8).
Not to mention that Valve have mentioned wanting to venture into hardware development, which has been suggested might also run Linux (although this is mostly wild speculation as of yet).
Now there have been projects like wine to help fill this gap, but it is often a struggle to get things to work under it, if they can work at all, making it more attractive to just use windows.
It has been great that allot of indie games coming out over the past few years, mostly being fully cross platform. Which is nice, but without the main stream games we are never going to capture the gamers from the windows community.
There is also the option to dual boot, but I find gamers tend to spend most of their time playing games and switching between OS's just to browse the web or watch a movie is a pain so they would rather just use one OS.
All this makes it great news that Valve have almost finished their work porting the steam client and source engine to linux
Which was originally announced back in 2010. But not only that but they seem to be preferring Linux as a gaming platform over the newer version of windows (8).
Originally posted by [URL]http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_linux_dampfnudeln &num=2[/URL]
Not to mention that Valve have mentioned wanting to venture into hardware development, which has been suggested might also run Linux (although this is mostly wild speculation as of yet).