whats the best distro for gaming. I want to play all my windows games such as CS Source on linux

Hmmm. To be honest, every distro will do just about as well. What you really want to look into is "cedega". Google around for that a bit and check out their website. Cedega does cost money, but it is very reasonably priced IMHO. Cedega is easy to set up, has a nice, easy to use GUI, and will generally run a good 25% of the popular games out there.

I know cedega will let you play CS Source, because I've done it before

Any distro that can run Cedega and will let you use the latest ATI or nVidia drivers should work fine.

Linux is in general not good for gaming and I guess you won't be able to play all your windows games without several issues. And one distro isn't better than another for this task as long as you know how to configure it properly. But in any case you have to learn more about "Wine" and/or "Cedega" (ask google).

*Ahem* I know it's not what you asked for, but you and others might not be aware - for *native* Linux games, probably the two best distros are either <a href="http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=llgp">Linux live gaming project</a> or <a href="http://wolvix.org/node/24">Wolvix games edition</a>. I realize games on Linux are disparaged far and wide, but there is some effort to improve in this area and they deserve a *little* credit for it. The SDL library and PyGame in particular have helped a lot - I'd estimate that Linux games have about 5-10 years to catch up to the mainstream.

Well, in the genere of FPS, the industry heavy-weights generally do ship a linux version. The quake serier ( uptil quake 4 ) and Doom3, even The recent versions of Unreal Tournment all seem to have native Linux versions ( native as in no emulator required ) and with these games the performance i have seen is much beter than on windows ( especially quake4 which eats up ram like crazy and really screws around M$ based systems while my Fedora box takes it silently and stands up to it beautifully ). UT2007 comming in a few months will also have 100% linux compatibility so lets just say that the biggest games in the recent PC market all work withou emulators

WRONG!
Linux is a fantastic gaming platform.
It supports OpenGL and runs linux games beautifully and stably.
When games are released with windows and linux versions I've always found the linux versions to have superior frame rates and performance than their windows counterpart. (e.g. Quake 4, Doom 3, Neverwinter Nights)

I assume what you meant to say was that "Linux is in general not good for windows games".

No, I meant what I wrote. I never said, that Linux doesn't have the possibilities to to run modern games (I know it better, too), but as long as there is so little demand, no (or only few) game producers will invest money in this market... neither would I, if I wanted to make money. Surely, every now and then there is native Linux version, but 99% of the new ("popular") games only run under Wind*** or on modern gaming consoles, and this won't change in near future. Even Wine/Cedega have very often massive problems with these new games. So if someone asked me for a good gaming platform, Linux won't be my first choice, to put it mildly. Or in other words: "Linux is in general not good for gaming."

Well, i dont know about 99% of the popular games but i do know that the industries best games are built on linux using opengl and they have dedicated ( non-emulated ) linux versions running which run much beter on linux itself than windows. for me i cant be happier abt playing games on linux and am happy even without the 99% "popular" games you are talking abt. my advice is, stick to the "good" games and you should be more than satisfied with linux.