It’s been about two years since I left Windows entirely and went all in for Linux, but at long last, I’ve returned to a dual boot setup to play some games that I find awesome. For those of you who haven’t sold your soul to the geek demons, that means that when I turn my computer on, it asks if I want to boot into Linux or Windows.

In particular, I’ve put Windows back on my machines for Civilization 4 and its expansion packs, but I’ve also got a copy of Half Life 2: Episode One, and I may get the Orange Box for PC as well. All of this is done through Steam, which is a pay-once-per-title-forever package manager, and this is nice since I can put all my Steam games on all my machines very easily. Apparently Steam is very popular in the Windows gaming crowd, which is kind of amusing to me since I can’t help but wonder how many of its users know that the idea behind it is pretty directly inspired by the way that most people choose to get software on Linux.

Anyway, it’s interesting. I’m still using Linux most of the time, but when I am logged on to Windows, it seems a little bit quicker than I remember it. Of course, this is probably mostly because it’s such a minimal configuration (it’s pretty much just Steam installed and nothing else). But hey, I’ll give credit where I think it’s due. I also think that the updates and bugfixes they’ve released in the nearly two years have helped as well. And I noticed that now, you only need to download an update and restart to download the validator and restart to download the updates and restart, which is an improvement in the sanity department (it used to be that the chain went on even longer, hehe).

A few people have asked me why I didn’t just use Wine, a free library that allows Unix users to natively run Windows APIs, or one of the commercial spinoffs of Wine, like Cedega or CrossOver. These are great projects and often work well for regular applications, but the fact of the matter is that they aren’t perfect. Wine always seems to be several steps behind the current generation of Windows software when it comes to support and is kind of a hassle to use. Cedega and CrossOver are really good at staying current, but they do cost money (which is questionably legitimate since they’re derivatives of Wine, which is published under the GNU license), and since I’m a miser and have enough Windows discs to legally install on my machines, that was the way to go for me.

Again though, I still use Linux almost all the time because it really is faster, prettier, and way more full-featured. I don’t know that I’ll ever be anything more than a casual gamer, but if I ever do take it to the next level, I’m pretty sure that I’d still use Linux for everything else because frankly, I’m spoiled now. I only wish that most of my friends could play with Linux for a while and see what the big deal is. Good thing I’ve got plenty of Ubuntu discs to give out, if they ever ask.

Update: Well, it’s back to being slow and kludgy compared to Linux. Still not as bad as it could be, but certainly noticeable. Naturally.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 2:50 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.