>Yes, if you want to game, windows seems like a more convenient choice, nobody disputes that.

Gaben is closing that gap for us.

Also, Minecraft runs fine on Linux. If GP poster had trouble, it's probably down to a video driver issue (which aren't unique to Linux, but are arguably more painful), or a new-environment-learning-curve thing.

I don't think Valve will doing for longer time if the studios don't care.

Sure they will. You wouldn't believe how many new games Steam is trying to throw at me on Linux.

The big studios might not care too much (though even this isn't really universal, since there are plenty of big studios that do target Linux/SteamOS), but there's a lot of activity from indie developers, many of whom are targeting SteamOS before they even target OS X (though there still aren't any SteamOS exclusives that I know of).

I think that Valve has bet the farm on Linux. Gaben seems to think that Microsoft might build their own game marketplace and use it to push Valve out.

This isn't just related to 3. party games.

I've seen and helped people that hit these brick walls everywhere, whether it's installing the OS itself, a compiler, accessing a thumb drive, or whatever other task they want to accomplish.

These are things that may be incredibly trivial for us that's comfortable in this environment, but a brick wall for others.

Linux OS installation used to be objectively difficult even for a reasonable computer user. That hasn't been true for more than a decade. IMO, the relative difficulty of getting the Windows vs Linux installed and nominally working inverted some years ago. Take a group of college freshmen who've never even seen Linux before and have them install both OS. Measure which of those tasks is completed first/correctly, and which takes more supervision.

Well I have a B+ and installed Raspbian for a little home energy project that reads from my smart meter over serial and pushes the data to the cloud. The programming was easy, I spent 5x as much time trying to get things installed. Finally got Cloud9 working, never was able to get InfluxDB installed, kind of got OrientDB installed (it crashes).

I consider myself a technical person and while I think it's fun to use Linux, it's certainly not productive.

> I consider myself a technical person and while I think it's fun to use Linux, it's certainly not productive.

Should read: "...I'm certainly not productive."

Just because you struggled with the Linux paradigm, it doesn't mean that it's an unproductive platform.