Stranger Danger wrote:its not what you think
this isn't a "drop windows for your pc" type of OS.
All it is, is a Linux based CONSOLE operating system for their upcoming steam box or whatever..its going to be so you can play steam games on their console.
You are not going to want to trash windows and all the functionality of your PC out the window and only play games on your PC...unless you do I guess.
if they can get some decent office software developers on steam (shouldn't be hard) and it has the ability to at least read MS office files...then ill gladly drop windows however.
I don't think you fully understand what Linux is. Linux is a complete OS. It can do everything windows can do, and usually do it better. The only reason Linux is not mainstream is because most, if not all, linux builds are not fully GUI capable. Meaning that to do some of the things that most people take for granted on windows must be done through a command line interface. Meaning you must have a much deeper understanding of OS's to accomplish what you want.
As of right now Linux is VASTLY superior to windows, if you know how to get it to do what you want it to do. Windows is a bloated resource hog, and is very inefficient in many of its functions, not to mention the windows has a ridiculous amount of services and overhead running in the background that eats through a lot of system resources. On top of this, Windows has massive security flaws, and linux is light years ahead of windows when it comes to security if set up correctly. I am in no way trying to bash windows. they have accomplished an incredible feat by making an OS that can work on millions of different hardware configurations. but that does not mean it is the best thing out there.
Right now there are 2 things holding linux back as a gaming platform.
1) Device drivers. Driver support for things like graphics cards and other things is atrociously bad.
2) Directx. For the past 15 years the large majority of games have utilized Microsoft Direct X package to design and implement graphics processing. But with the announcement of Steam OS, Nvidia has stated that they will be drastically increasing there support for linux based systems utilizing there hardware, and if Steam OS gains traction AMD will also follow suite. Right now there is an alternative to DirectX, its called OpenGL and it has one main advantage over Direct X and that is that it can be run on basically anything IE: Mac/Linux/Windows with little porting needed. The problem is that no one uses it because the main gaming platform is windows. Also, AMD has announced that the next gen consoles will be utilizing something called MANTLE. It is a low level API that allows access to AMD vid cards at the hardware level. This alone, will allow developers to make games much more efficient when utilizing AMD hardware, it will also have the added benefit of making porting games to other systems much easier. You are right, in that, right now you wont abandon Windows. In 3-5 years, things will be very different. We are currently witnessing the start of a major change in the OS market, and Microsoft dominance will be challenged, and quite possibly broken.
I personally use Linux on my file server, media center and laptop. And it is absolutely fantastic what you can do with it.
Edit: there is plenty of office software and other programs for Linux, and it is completely free. Check out sourceforge, and linuxSoftware.org. There are millions of free programs all developed by the linux/open source community that work great and have all the functionality that proprietary software has.