I just did a major computer upgrade. I thought: "What games can I play to enjoy it?" Then I looked at the "Linux Games" list in Steam and was very disappointed. The only recent Triple-A game was Metro: Last Night (which I will not play next because I haven't played Metro 2033 yet). Worst of all, Portal 2 is not out for Linux yet!

Therefore, I will be running Slackware as a VirtualBox guest on top of Windows for the next little while. That will get me the entertainment I want from Windows and the productivity I want from Linux.

I might switch to a dual-boot setup some time down the road.

Steam under Wine runs great too. Why Windows?

Eric

Great, yes.

Native quality, no.

Of course, not!

Because, Wine is a better gaming platform than Windows, for the Steam (Windows based) Games...

All with using good Nvidia video cards and the right settings...

Strange but true...

@Darth Vader

Yes, that's sometimes true.

It's mostly indie games on Steam for Linux right now, but there's still a lot worth checking out, IMO.

These are some of my favorites right now:
Rogue Legacy - difficult Metroidvania roguelike game
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - truck driving simulator
Hotline Miami - super-violent top-down action game w/ cool music
Cook, Serve, Delicious! - addicting restaurant sim
Monaco - co-op heist game
Killing Floor - co-op survival horror FPS (better than L4D2, IMO)
Amnesia/Penumbra - first person survival horror games
Hammerwatch - co-op game similar to Gauntlet
Ticket to Ride - digital version of the popular board game
Game Dev Tycoon
FTL: Faster than Light
King Arthur's Gold

Not on Steam:
Fancy Skulls - Simple FPS roguelike (still in alpha state)

Then of course there's the stuff from Valve. Half-life, Portal, TF2, etc...

/r/linux_games on reddit is a good place to look for more

New games are nonsense anyway, PrBoom-Plus & DosBox and i'm all set!

Yea, Dosbox and Lemmings - what else could I possibly need?!

Linux is slowly getting the attention of game developers, but people have to be willing to ask for game ports to get these into existence.

My advice Dugan, hit up your favorite game developers to make ports for Linux, and if necessary start up a petition to gain attention.

The Playstation 4 already uses a variant of FreeBSD 9 with an x86_64 architecture, so getting games onto Linux is probably going to be easy, but if nobody asks, it won't happen.

My suggestion? Play every single game you can on Slackware (hopefully dual-booted), then play the ones you can't on Windows.

Valve tracks who's playing what on what, and they publish what their linux numbers are. Developers will listen if we play on our favorite systems!

Windows is great for playing games. It even produces random crashes.

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If you like 3D shooter first person, there is all the games from idsoftware.
I don't know if the new Rage was released for Linux too.
And there is the Steam stuff such Half-Life like piratesmack said.
Another game that I like very much is Unreal (and Tournament),
but I don't know if there is a Linux version for it.
(or if there is Unreal in Steam at all )

Not being a gamer I don't really care about what's available. However, I wonder why you are happy to run Linux in a VM so you an play games on Windows yet you seem not to have considered running Windows in a VM so you can play games.

While you can get around with a VM for using productivity desktop applications and even integrate them seamlessly into your Linux desktop using tech like VMware Unity Mode, games virtualization is a thing, that is not there.

Most games require either the graphics software stack from nVidia or AMD to be present, which you only get by installing their drivers. The drivers require the hardware to be present. If you go to advanced topics like nVidia 3D Vision, this may never be happening on Linux at all, at least not on virtual machines.

Regarding Steam usage statistics: I think Valve is mostly interested in who has the Steam client installed for testing it. They know for sure, there will be no mass migration to the Linux desktop for actually playing games. Their porting effort targets the SteamBox with SteamOS and having native Linux games on your Linux desktop is a nice side effect of that.

Finally, some thoughts on running Linux virtualized on a Windows machine: It makes your complete Linux operation dependent on a vulnerable Windows setup and nullifies most of the advantages of the Linux kernel. On top of that, you also put its fate into the hands of your virtualization solution, which may break at any time.

It should be noted, that the Windows host is not Oracle's tier 1 platform, because Oracle needs VirtualBox mostly to virtualize stuff on their Solaris and Linux boxes. For production use, I would recommend a commercially supported VMware Workstation, which is expensive for a reason. (You can get it much cheaper by using VMware Fusion on OS X.)

The biggest advantage of a multi-boot system is that all OSes are completely independent of each other, so if one them breaks, the others still works. If your Windows box gets infested by malware, your Slackware VM is unusable, too. But instead of throwing money on expensive virtualization, you could also throw it on a second machine, because real iron is not that expensive anymore. You can integrate the second box into your primary desktop using X11/RDP remoting or KVM, while still having the advantages of completely independent operation.

For that reason I'm running dualboot as well from time to time. I like it more than virtual machines as that way I won't have possible performance or stability issues though I'm not sure how big are those nowadays.
Games tend to get boring pretty quickly so I think you'll switch back soon anyway.