If you get a bad virus in Windows, you're pretty much, should I say, fucked. Non-admin or not, you still have access to the system32 folder if I remember right, and that means the virus has access to the system. I'm not big on Windows security, as right now:

[wrr@localhost : bash 3.1.16] <~> $
uptime
11:37:49 up 6 days, 2:05, 4 users, load average: 0.01, 0.10, 0.15

I don't have a need for Windows much anymore. I may be tempted to grab Vista and VMware, but thats a big if (Rather pay monthly for Cedega and play semi-old games).

But back to viruses, in Windows, I'm sure a virus can simply hack its way through the security measures, and get to the core system with little difficulty.

Please don't compare the PSP with windoze here, it shall be impossible to hack through windoze in a level to make DirectX 10 work on windoze XP (different driver model)
As you point out and I'm fully aware of that, DirectX 10 shall be only available for windoze Vista and the XP shall stick to DirectX 9, and I imagine and I'm already freakin seeing it that a bunch of new games on the forthcoming years shall have the leyend "DirectX 10 or superior required". Goddamn monopoly.... Vista runs slow and bloated with 1 gig of RAM you can't expect to play decently on such pseudo-OS

Yeah you can. Just install it on a, hmm, Cray XLR (or is it XLS? Forgot exactly), but i'm not sure Winderz can handle 18k proccessors running parrallel...

Hell, I'm not sure it can handle two...

That's why game consoles were invented in the first place. It's simply cheaper to buy a new PS or new XBOX than buy a new computer with a Vista on board (and play tricks with the drivers, patches, fixes etc.), at least for now. Windows just isn't for gaming anymore, if it ever was.

Apparently you havn't seen the proposed cost of the PS3

That's why I'm sticking for some years to my current dual-boot setup, I can play waaaay better games and earlier on the PC than on any game console (just to mention FEAR, Doom3 and UT2004)
And I hope those games-developing dirtbags don't start their hopes on DirectX 10 too soon...

That's a winner point you made LOL!! :D :D :D

/me bows

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night!

well actually
 

I wasn't thinking of making it run on XP, just a lower version of Vista if the money hungry marketing idea is true. But it doesn't matter since I don't feel like wasting money on a new gfx card anytime soon.

I have been using my pre-installed Windows XP to play emulators, like N64 emulators, since my new PC is actually powerful enough to handle it. But I need to quit and set up emulators on Linux because I'm afraid that malicious morons could try to edit the roms and use potential exploits in the emulator software to run evil code when I play the h4cked rom. They would edit this n64-rom, for example, to hijack the emulator software to run malicious win32 code, but if I am on Linux, this will not be a problem. I have never heard of anyone writing a virus in a rom but I'm sure it can be done. After all, emulators are written by teen programmers who live in their basement (no disrespect intended--I stay in my room all the time myself) so I don't know if they take the time to make sure all of their function calls are safe from attack. Writing code to check for malware in a rom would slow performance down anyway.

Wista is a good joke! :D:D:D

I think linux could be an excellent gaming OS. I mean, we could log in using nothing but an X-window prompt (we need x11 running for games of course)--no fancy desktop and other crap--and then launch the game from the X11 commandline so that the game can have the most performance without gnome or kde and its utilities hogging up CPU time and memory. Now, you can't log into Windows without launching every freaking thing under the sun. I couldn't even figure out how to set what starts up in Windows XP until I read about some mysterious "msconfig startup.ini" on some forums by accident. I couldn't find this good command in any windows help file.

Actually, I've seen another answer to this ;)

in your .xinitrc file (or whatever there happens to be with your system):

echo "path/to/game" >> .xinitrc

startx

That will run the game AS THE WM!

Neat little trick, that.

Smooth...
So I need to replace the line startkde with the command of my favorite game?
What would happen when the game exits? The X server exits as well?

Think so. Try it out ;)

I really wouldn't want to go into fail safe mode + bash and use vi to edit a file everytime I wanted to switch between desktop and a game, but it would be really neat if the x11 would close the desktop system and then launch the game each time I wanted to launch the game from the desktop environment. When the game exits, x11 could restart the desktop. I have no idea how this would be possible since I can't do much shell scripting or anything fancy, but it would be very good for games that need CPU power and memory. Windows needs something like that as well. But then again, the loading time of starting a desktop may not be worth it.

What you may want to do is disable the Don'tZap option in xorg.conf, and in the startx script have it read a variable like "GAMESTART". When it closes, and GAMESTART=wenoth, for instance, it kills X and the WM/DE, then echos "exec wesnoth" into your x start file, then re-starts X, and clears the variable.

How you would switch back I don't know, but that was just off the top of my head.