Oh how I rue the time I pissed away last weekend attempting to get my goddamn joystick to work properly on my PC instead of actually playing some game on one of my consoles.

Problem: I bought a new Logitech gamepad (are there any other kinds in the stores today? apparently not). It works fine with most games, but with Everyday Shooter, the game I *really* need it to work with, in the heat of battle the fucking D-pad locks in one direction and fails to respond. Everyday Shooter is one of those games where ONE WRONG MOVE will cause you to die. The analog joystick is not up to the task. I NEED MY D-PAD TO WORK and when I press the UP ARROW it better goddamn well go UP. And when it doesn't, it's maddening.

I finally found some fellow sufferers on Steam's Everyday Shooter forums. Conclusion: game is fucking not working right and has not yet been patched. The final post on the page details a possible working configuration and a successful joystick.cfg file.

Which brings me to my main point: instead of playing the goddamn game the way I want to, I am still troubleshooting the problem that is jacking my D-Pad. This is not gaming, this is IT labor.

I guess I could buy a $600 PS/3 to play this $10 game, but instead here I am bitching about my PC. Windows gaming = suckage. I rest my case.

Windows gaming, like everything Windows, suffers from a clusterfuck of drivers, vendors and bullshit. Although my gamepad problem actually seems to be solely the fault of the Everyday Shooter developer.

Mac gaming, like everying Mac, suffers from a very short list of titles. Sometimes this is a good thing, so "suffers" is the wrong word. For example, I'm glad there are not 500 different shareware applications that do the same thing on the MacOS, only 5. But in the gaming world, this is a problem.

Some big-ticket games do come to the Mac. Like Spore, for instance.

But this question is no longer important if you're considering a new computer, as you can buy a Mac, partition off a chunk of your hard drive for Windows and via Bootcamp dual boot into MacOS or Windows. For that matter, you could install Linux in a third partition and really have it all. But for gaming purposes, you want Windows. The only annoyance is rebooting to get there.

The more I play in ubuntu the more confident I am that I don't even need my XP partition anymore.

See: Wine

I'm not sure how well that's going to hold up in graphics/memory intense PC gaming. The forums say it's great for programs (I use) like photoshop or illustrator, but it starts developing problems for people using it for sound editing programs like ableton, soundforge, etc.

There is an entry for Everyday Shooter in the Wine Application Databass but there isn't any dicussion of problems I could find.

Not that any of this will resolve your issue. So wait... what's the point? Oh yeah! Linux is fucking sweet and I recommend it.

Though I am satisfied with the Mac I use at work, but I don't see any of the advantages of using OSX. Everything I like about OSX, Ubuntu does as well and sometimes better.

So for gaming, I guess that leaves you with, uh, TTY-mode Nethack

Oh, please! I can still sate my bloodlust (whether by blowing stuff up, or sending my guys to go kill those other guys) with Kohan, Heavy Gear 2, SMACX, Myth2, or Postal Plus. (Or Soldier of Fortune if I could still get it to run.)

I miss you, Loki.

That's what I meant about TTY-mode Nethack: it's pretty much the best game for a Linux box with no graphics.

There are all kinds of nutty FOSS games for Linux, plus the Loki ports Sloppy mentions, and emulators for this, that and the other console.

It's still a pretty spartan world for games, although if we're talking Flash-based webgames, apparently Linux has now reached parity with Windows and MacOS with a simultaneous 3-way release of Flash 10. Too bad Flash is essentially a Trojan.

Re: hardware support. Just wait until you try to configure wireless networking. Or some USB device not identified in the kernel. Whoops, there goes your whole weekend!

OTOH, comparing Linux to Windows hardware hell is not fair. We were comparing Linux to the Mac. There is no deeper pit than a Windows hardware problem. The Linux problem may be hairy, but there is always a way to fix it, even though that might mean recompiling a driver or the kernel itself. With Windows the answer is often "Reinstall Windows." Or "Buy a new computer." With the Linux, the power is always in your hands.

I haven't tried to setup a wireless (or any other) network, and I don't take for granted that it will be easy when I do.

It really just depends on whether or not the driver is in the kernel. Sometimes it's trivial (just works) and sometimes it's not.

And that is the real "problem" with Linux: you gotta research hardware before you buy it, instead of just assuming that you'll find drivers for everything.

I haven't used Ubuntu (I'm a Gentoo guy), but according to hearsay, their userspace is really slick and about as easy to use as the big 2 proprietary OSes. So if your kernel sees the wireless, things ought to be pretty easy.

what if I had money but wanted to buy a workstation with 8 quadcore AMD Opterons?

Heh heh. Well, I know which way I would go with a machine like that. But MacOS might actually be an option there too. See Hackintosh.

you gotta research hardware before you buy it, instead of just assuming that you'll find drivers for everything.

The same goes for Windows, really. Sometimes driver X from manufacturer A doesn't work properly with driver Y, version Z.00 from manufacturer B. The sheer tonnage of vendors who produce hardware and drivers for Windows means that some collisions are going to occur.

Sometimes it's a real pain to find out if a piece of hardware has a Linux driver. It's like it's a secret or something, and it takes clever Googling to unearth it. And most computer shops are not hip to Linux. It took me forever to find an SATA PCI card that would work under Linux (hint: Addonics). The dude at the local computer shop sold me something that he glibly announced would be Linux-compatible. It was not.

That's another lovely thing about the Apple line: limited, but solid choices, all drivers built-in. It just works because Apple controls the whole package. For me, the easy life, please.

This has gotten WAY off topic except that it does underscore my original point about Windows gaming.