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Comment by mattacular | Hacker News Reader

I think Newell has misjudged why Linux hasn't taken off as a personal computing platform. Sure, the lack of games doesn't help, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

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I suspect that if there is anyone in a position to research the problem and actually execute a solution, it is him. It's not like he's some kid who thinks tuxracer is the bee's knees.

Games is the only thing why i still have Windows on my Laptop. I can cope with the rest just fine on Linux.

I would personally say that gaming is a giant chunk of the iceberg. Others (for me) would be video editing, and music production. Oh, and testing sites in Internet Explorer.

What i do is taking the Microsoft IE test images and run them under VirtualBox for that task ;)

In case you didn't know: MS provides images for different versions of Windows and Internet Explorer for exactly that purpose: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=115...

Microsoft provides virtual images of various windowses just for testing websites in various Internet Explorer versions.

sure, most of my friends are CS majors, but if they aren't linux users already, the reason they always cite is the lack of support for games. What else is there for an end user?

I use a Mac as my main computer, but keep a PC just for games. I would love to use Linux on it and not have to pay for Windows. Is there another category of software that is as exclusive to windows as games? I can get everything else I need via web apps or OSX.

There are a lot of windows-only apps in the business world.

There are also a lot of apple-only apps in the business world.

And how many business apps are being built for windows right now, compared to the number that are being built of iOS and osX right now?

I guess that the latter has much more activity...

I think the latter has a lot more visibility, at least.

I'm sure there are a lot of custom and legacy business apps out there tied to windows. But thinking of broad categories of business software (Office/productivity, browser, IDE, graphics editing, accounting, contact management), there are lots of alternatives that will run on a non-Windows PC. But looking at games as a category, you don't have comparable options on Mac or Linux.

I can second this. While support for games is improving on nix, it's still a huge turn off to have to switch OSs when you want to load up whatever you're playing. So it's still nix at work, Windows at home for me.

A decent window manager.

dunno what you are talking about... xmonad is great. :P

CS majors make up a rather small percentage of all PC users. What is your point exactly?

I think the point is even stronger because they are CS majors. These are people who develop software, and use their computer for many more purposes than the average user. If gaming is the only barrier for a CS major, then what's stopping the average user from switching to Linux?

I'd also like to to add to your point that power users are generally early adopters and set the stage for change.

The more of a switch to Linux for power users, the more we see applications developed for Linux, and the more we see a need for regular users to switch to a Linux platform.

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