(I posted this on Slashdot tonight and thought it was worth sharing.)

I did two major things last week:
1. I quit smoking
2. I quit Windows

The two have nothing to do with one another, but I can tell you that replacing a machine which had been running Windows for over two years certainly tested my new non-need for nicotine.

Tribes2 came from tuxgames, and I no longer work at Eudora. I don't really need Windows anymore. So I wiped my big, fast SCSI drive and threw Linux on it. No more using the tinier and slower drive in dual boot when I want Linux. I'm going to have an actual uptime on my main, daily-use machine. And now the only Win32 machines in the house are my wife's.

I've been using Linux since 1994 (Slack, even) and I'm pretty familiar with it. I have a couple machines at home that run Linux (including a gateway built from the Linux Router Project's stuff that has no hard disk). I'm confident when working with Linux, and I use it at work. I don't really like Windows all that much and I've been wanting to dump it for years. Yet it was a hard decision to leave Windows completely.

What games will I be giving up? Will there be some new killer app I cannot run? Can I live with Samba for all my non-Linux connectivity? Will all my USB stuff work? Will the latest CVS snapshot Voodoo5 drivers be better than the six month old Win32 ones? Will they work at all? How will I update my BIOS now that they pack them in Win32 self-extracting EXEs? How's WINE doing these days? Can I get drivers for my old Canon laser printer?

I think things are fine. I've got stunnel doing cool things, and ssh port forwards for my mail. Opera runs like a champ, and I can get pix out of my digital camera. I'm thinking of installing GNUCash. I feel comfortable for the first time in years. It's like being home again. I wrote a shell script that did absolutely nothing, just because I could.

But if the decision to completely switch was hard for me, it must be really, really hard for the casual user. I can't imagine what a new Linux user would do. ("I have to link a GLU DRI to what .so thingy where? Huh?") I think it would be nearly impossible for the average/new Linux users to make the switch.

So we need WINE. We also need native ports. It's a very tough question. I can tell you that the people like me won't support Lokigames -- there aren't enough of us. But if we rely on WINE to run all our non-ported apps, MS (or someone) will work on breaking the implementation, just like what happened to AIM and Samba. I'll deal with either WINE or a native port (ports preferred), but if the goal is new Linux users then games aren't where the answer is. Ask anyone with Mac OSX to burn a disc and see what they think of Unix. The interface to the OS needs significant ease-of-use changes.