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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

Why not? Missing games are the last and only "serious" issue of Linux. Well, maybe apart from Adobes product. But that's quite seriuos: Not being able to play normal and modern games is why I have Windows installed, and it's why i couldn't convince my nonexisting kids to use linux solely.

More Games means more user means more games (means better gpu-driver). It's a really old theory, and i think it's one that is sound, that linux somehow has to start the spirale and end the issue of having not enough user for games and therefor not enough games for users. Steam with some Valve-games could change that indeed.

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Games are the only thing you can't run with good performance inside a VM. That's why you can always spin up a Windows VM if you need Photoshop but you HAVE to reboot if you want to enjoy a game. So yes, this would be definitely a game changer

I've had luck with VMWare and nvidia cards, as long as your processor supports virtulization. Near-native performance, minus the fact that you have Linux eating some of your resources. It gets pretty touchy though, and last time I tried it on an ATI card the drivers didn't support it.

This still isn't going to mean many more games for Linux. Presumably Valve will port the Source engine games, but that's just a tiny percentage of what they sell on Steam. The vast majority of the titles are third party, and even though Steam will give them a Linux distribution channel, it doesn't do much to convince them to create Linux games.

I'd say lack of Microsoft Office is the another big issue. LibreOffice/OpenOffice has come along away but is nowhere near as polished, and never quite displays a document the way it was meant to be. That's what kept me dual booting until I got a Mac.

I don't agree. That whole cities like munich use linux for their offices shows pretty clearly that this is not a real showstopper.

Not saying that Libre Office doesn't sometimes choke on complex documents - but that you are even using proprietary document formats makes the matter complex. It's probably something where one could compromise if you'd want to (or, depending on your job, could). Besides, givenall the online alternatives, their are really quite a lot of ways to not depend on Microsoft Office.

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