Does it count if I want to be?

If I could only get steam working under Ubuntu I would be a happy, happy man.

I've done the Cedega thing , which, while surprisingly good, wasn't easier than dual-booting. Ironically, Linux's (well, KDE's) ability to remember what I was doing on shutdown and automatically bring applications back up on startup helped minimize the time lost to rebooting anyway.

Now the closest thing I have to "Linux gaming" is a big button that tells GRUB to boot me straight to Windows and a corresponding straight to Linux button in Windows. Makes rebooting just a little less painless.

Dual booting. Windows is for play. Linux is for getting things done.

OK, I signed up for this.

I've used Linux exclusively for 15 years. It runs on my work laptop (SuSE, what else). I have always felt there were more than enough games for native Linux. Every version of Doom, Quake, later Serious Sam. And, of course, Unreal! The latter always installed straight of the disc! A lot of shooters. That way I guess it skewed my view of the gaming market somewhat.
As for the open source games, there aren't too many I've spent serious time with. Cube/Sauerbraten never convinced me. I do love freeciv though! There were times when I spent way too many hours playing Glest.

Lately I have started playing some of my old DOS faves on dosbox, which works like a charm. Wine is starting to really run a lot of games too.

As for other platforms, the Wii is really the first console that seemed different enough from PC games to interest me. But then I started getting into some of the old Gamecube classics because of it (Metroid Prime, Pikmin), so maybe I was wrong...

Count me in the category of 'I'd love to'. However, as others have mentioned, Windows and DirectX continue to dominate the market, and so long as people refuse to fork their games into OpenGL so that I can at least run them in WinE, I'll continue to game on windows, work on windows(I really wish this wasn't the case, although technically, most of my work is done in Solaris ), and play with Linux at home.

I run whatever is old and I can on my linux laptop. I love using linux but the lack of any real games support means it's relegated to the productivity machine. I mostly do emulators, text adventures etc. on it. I've tried out various linux-released games but after awhile I tend to ask myself "why aren't I playing big awesome game X on windows?" and quit. It's rare that I'll want to play a game badly enough that I'll mess around with wine or cedega -- I tend to just walk to the windows pc.

I'm just getting back into Ubuntu because of Gnome 2.22 and am looking at Linux for gaming, since it's a laptop I'm not really looking for anything 3D heavy but just things like Peggle and random indie games like GalCon

I play WoW in WINE, as well as a few of the open source games (Urban Terror, OpenArena, Battle for Wesnoth). I have a hard time these days new games to play which aren't wrapped in DRM or sold out to in-game advertising.

I think he meant games.

Linux Gaming is not as bad as people make it out to be, although it's nowhere near where it could be.

No problem.

I have two configurations for GRUB, one in which Windows is the default, and one in which Linux is the default. Under /boot/grub, create two copies of your menu.lst: menu_windows.lst and menu_linux.lst. Change the default in each to point to your Windows and Linux boot option, respectively. You're looking to change this (this is the Windows version):

The number corresponds to its place in the GRUB menu, with 0 as the first option, 1 as the second, etc.

I then created two Python scripts, one for each configuration (this is the boot to Windows version, the boot to Linux version replaces the commands and paths with Windows counterparts):

import os
import sys

def mainFunction():
  cmd = "cp /boot/grub/menu_windows.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst "
  print getoutput(cmd)
  cmd = "shutdown -r now"
  print getoutput(cmd)

# Hacked version of Python's getoutput()
def getoutput(cmd):
     pipe = os.popen('{ ' + cmd + '; } 2>&1', 'r')
     text = pipe.read()
     if text[-1:] == '\n': text = text[:-1]
     return text

#Main is below
if __name__ == "__main__":
  mainFunction() 

I then mapped the script to a shortcut. Note that writing to /boot/grub/ from Windows requires read/write ability on your Linux drive; I use http://www.fs-driver.org/.

That's it. If you want, I can e-mail both script versions to you along with my GRUB files.

Hey, cool. I didn't know those worked.

The only PC game I play is WoW, and I do so on Mac OSX, which is derived from BSD, and is very much a member of the *NIX family of operating systems. Does that count?

Oh, and many times I have to use Vi instead of Emacs when working on the FreeBSD servers at work, which often feels like some kind of sick, sadistic game, so there is that too.