Introduction, or WHY DEAR LORD WHY

I used to game on Windows. It was great. I'd heard of Linux, even tried it a few times. Let's be honest though, it was awful back then. Windows users, especially gamers (read: power users), are used to having to tweak their OS to get what they want out of it. They're also used to having GUIs expose OS functionality to them. On the rare occasion that they have to do something drastic, they're reading a handy guide and it's got fancy links and formatting to show them how to get things done. Linux offered none of that. If you wanted to fix one your all-too-frequent problems, you had to patch it yourself. Give me a break. I just want to play games.

So skip forward a few years. Linux stopped being so awful as Ubuntu matured. Windows started getting more awful as Vista showed up. Microsoft started treating XP more and more like an unwanted stepchild, and there was no way I was subjecting my beautiful hardware to the bloated, infested mass that was Vista. It was time for me to take off the training wheels and become a real computer user.

I switched to Linux. I still use it, on all of my machines, so obviously there's something right with it. But there's a lot wrong too. I don't want there to be things wrong with my Operating System, that's why I switched in the first place. Here's where FOSS ideals start kicking in. You might tell me, submit a patch, or fork a project, or make your own distro.

Sure, I could do that. I could reinvent the wheel. But it's time we stopped being a bunch of whiny little children, and started working together. So my contribution to all this will be my thoughts and observations, as a user of Linux. As a former Windows gamer, turned open source idealist. But still bitter about the games.

I'm not a developer. I don't spend hours with my head in code. I come at this from an outside perspective. Every day I boot up my computer, and I can't play the load of Windows games sitting on my shelf. I can't use Winamp, the best media player in the history of media players. There's a lot I can do that I couldn't do before, to be sure. But somewhere in this crazy world of penguins and other such mascots somebody missed the damn boat. Linux isn't what it should be. This blog will investigate those shortcomings. Hello.