You are completely right. Gaming is moving towards consoles. There are too many problems when customers try to get games running with Windows. Games written for Linux is just a curiosity nowadays, just like the first Windows games (remember Doom for Windows in its first version?).
Something that also drives Windows right now is connectivity. Many USB devices don't work on most Linux machines today (or Windows 2000).
I just read an article about the guys who implemented USB on Linux. They did that, because it was faster than writing an USB driver on Windows, because their Windows crashed all the time and had problems to deliver the required data rate. On their USB system it was much easier to develop a drver, and to make it run fast.
They say that it took them a weekend to implement the USB system, three people. So there are three possibilites:
- Microsoft used less than 6 mandays to implement USB.
- Microsoft is not as good a programmer.
- It is much harder to implement USB on Windows than on Linux.
I believe the third. This would also explain, why big hardware suppliers like Kodak, Logitech, Creative Labs, NVIDIA etc. had trouble with drivers on Windows 2000 for so long.
When Linux 2.4 comes out, Microsoft loses this advantage. They already lost it in SuSE Linux, which is the european equivalent to Red Hat Linux. SuSE Linux supports many different kinds of hardware, that Windows 2000 doesn't support without unsigned, third party drivers. |
