Short and simple. If you're a fairly hardcore gamer (Playing the newer up-to-date Windows games) is it worth getting linux?


I really don't use my computer for much more other than gaming. Surfing and chatting, too, but I don't think that really counts.


It's just my understanding that Linux doesn't support gaming all that well just yet..

I don't personally game that often but from what I have seen, you might want to just stick with Windows for now. You can most likely use like winex to use to run games under Linux but its still in development though and not too stable at times.
Now if you want to learn Linux and give it a shot, you can always dual boot. That's what most do it seems, they have a dual boot, Windows for gaming, Linux for everything else.

well, you got an idea - linux is not a gaming platform, even though some games are ran much smoother with openGL support (RTCW, Quake, UT - they have linux ports), as for other games there is winex project at http://www.transgaming.com that allows you to run some windows games on a linux machine and the list of supported games is impressive (it is still growing), and it takes effort and resources to setup winex on ones system (it might be confusing to compile the winex from CVS snapshot, also $5 bucks a month subscription fee for a precompiled binary is not that bad + you're making sure that more games are "ported" to linux ). As for surfing and chatting I guess it is no different than other choice, but it is more security oriented (no buggy, insecure IE here, minus annoying viruses, but don't get fooled that linux is immune to internet's nastiness - there are linux-oriented "surprises" around the corner, and if you are careful enough you can avoid them as much as possible). Have fun.