A lot of this seems like problems with the graphics sub-systems. It's getting better, but nvidia still doesn't have open-source drivers, and graphics switching still doesn't work (nor does power management). By "doesn't work" I mean that as someone with >10 years *nix sysadmin experience, I couldn't get everything to work right on Ubuntu 16.10 on a Dell XPS 9550 in a week of downtime effort (probably around 10 hours total).

If NVidia, Intel, and AMD got serious about Linux graphics support for enthusiasts and professionals, I'm sure we'd see a huge improvement and make switching viable for many traditional hold-outs. Chicken and egg, unfortunately.

> but nvidia still doesn't have open-source drivers

They dont have any open source drivers for ANY platform. So that's the same on Windows and Mac. On Linux you have the Nouveau (open source, independent) drivers for nVidia though, and you can already play some games with it despite major performance loss.

As for graphics switching you'll be happy to know this is a problem that the SOLUS distro is going to tackle in 2017 to have a better solution than the existing ones which are mostly broken.

Nvidia are serious about graphics for professionals. The linux driver is fast and continuously updated.

I have deployed thousands of workstations with various ranges of graphics cards. Nvidia is the simplest, a trailing second is AMD (they do make rolling RPMs easy though) They are just as buggy as the windows drivers.

Intel make brilliant drivers now, its just a shame the graphics cards are tiny compared to AMD/Nvidia.

Nvidia just don't do opensource drivers. For me, I frankly couldn't give a fig if they are open source or not, just so long as it works.

For the first time ever, I bought an AMD card. The open source drivers are miles ahead of the nvidia open source and binary drivers (at least with my old GTX 570 that used to work flawlessly, but now has tons of visual corruption).

The "TearFree" xorg feature does the best job of vsync I have seen in a long time. On the downside, the variable refresh rate stuff hasn't quite landed in mainline yet, and audio over display port hasn't either. holding breath

I agree. There is simply a lot of inertia on Windows heavy game development. Unfortunately, Windows will be needed for a long time for classic titles that probably wont be officially ported. Browsing through the list of top played Linux titles I am surprised by the many games I own that have since been ported, but I still see mostly indie titles. Until the really 'AAA' devs like Activision, EA, Ubisoft make changes I don't anticipate a n OS shift for the enthusiast crowd.

> Unfortunately, Windows will be needed for a long time for classic titles that probably wont be officially ported.

I don't think that is necessarily true. WINE does a wonderful job nowadays to run older games - while the support for DX11 is still very much work in progress. Most DX9 games run just fine, and older versions of DX have little to no issues either. IN some cases WINE does a better job running an older Windows game than Windows 10.