My son, who mostly plays Minecraft, does not understand why many of his friends use Apple PCs. The "render distance" and framerate in Minecraft on our home PC (running Windows 8.1) is twice that of his friends, and our PC cost half what a similar Apple costs.

As a parent, I'm also not sure if an equivalent of Family Safety exists on other platforms. Windows sends me weekly overviews of our kids PC use and blocks inappropriate content. Also, our kids log into their own profiles, I don't give them Administrator level access, they have to aks me if they want to install something.

On my desk now I have two MBPs and one windows PC. The macs are for work, the PC is for games (and occasional windows testing). I use the same kb/mouse/monitor for all 3.

After being out of the PC scene for 10+ years -- and as a rabid apple fan -- let me say this: PC gaming is AWESOME. Games I'd only played on Mac before come to new life on a proper gaming PC. That said I would probably go into a different line of work if I had to use Windows as my primary dev box.

Your only two choices are not an overpriced Mac and a cheap PC. You can build/buy a reasonably priced PC and install a GNU/Linux distribution on it.

As a Java application, Minecraft runs perfectly fine on any operating system.

As for your parental controls, if you wish to apply them you can do the exact same thing on any GNU/Linux platform.

This performance disparity between OS X and Windows for gaming may finally be diminished now that Apple’s bringing Metal from iOS to OS X (far faster than using OpenGL):

http://www.imore.com/metal-os-x-so-huge-i-no-longer-need-mac...

MSFT has done this by buying itself into the graphic API market long ago. Since then the last two main graphic hardware vendor have been poorly receptive to develop drivers for any other platform.

Hopefully, Valve OS's initiative might bend this and allow the Linux world to be at least on par with MSFT when it comes to graphic drivers. Considering that from the three main console out there, both the Playstation and the Nintendo are using a flavor or another of OpenGL, there is some hope for the future of alternative to MSFT outside the office and MSFT centric software development.

I'm really hoping STeam OS becomes a viable desktop gaming OS (play most if not all PC games) at some point.

I would drop Windows in a heartbeat if that happened. There is no other reason keeping me using it other than games.

I still think Win2k was a great operating system and I wish I could go back to it, but you do eventually have to upgrade. I eventually had to upgrade Win2k to Win7 because of the many performance benefits and the lack of support for the OS.

Even though I personally hate literally almost every new feature of Windows 10 and the design of the entire OS, I'm still running it, simply because I get much better performance out of it than I do on Win7 - and I can generally customize my UX.

I have no idea about the Sims, but I've run Spore under Wine without noticable issue.

Linux Mint has many usability features similar to Win 7, is free/free, and I've not had any issues with Win games ( wine / etc ) - plus they can learn command line & packages!

worth the time it takes to check it out, imo...

Have you looked at Linux with WINE? That could be a good transition from Windows into, eventually, pure Linux.