Comments?    There should be some, you know.

There should be tongue in cheek questions from the Linux users, since I gave them a straight line to hit on.

Go to your distro, download Steam.   All distros have Steam in their "programs to download" under games.

Crank it up and sign up for a Steam account linked to your charge card (so you can pay for purchases painlessly).

Look at what triple AAA big name games for Linux Steam is offering for less than $10 this week.

Buy one, play it .....

Repeat as needed.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr2GdRBDOmU    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaBgdnNoJE4             go ahead, you know you want to look  ......

No, I guess you don't understand anything but Windows, never having used anything else.

People used to say they couldn't leave Windows because of MS Office, then Office equivalents came out and they found out Office itself would run under Wine.

Now MS OFFICE is a Chromebook title in the Chrome store, i.e. a native Chrome App.

Then they said it was games, but games run on Linux under Steam now too (1,000s of them).

Then they said they didn't have new hardware (Linux runs fine on a 10 plus year old box for me, faster than Windows ever did).   The thought that a Linux OS could turn their old hardware into a race horse just didn't seem real to them.

Then they got an Android phone or a Tablet .... suddenly their eyes opened up to stuff that ran fast and didn't require weekly maintenance and you having to spend money/time on it all the time.

The bold ones loaded up a Linux Mint distro on their existing machine using a dual boot system -- and never looked back.

Steam does sales, BTW --- 80%-90% off type sales all the time.   I never buy a Triple AAA rated game for more than $9.99, ever.   Sometimes they have daily specials where the game is FREE to own for keeps, but the "daily deal" is open only for a few hours  .....

If a game is a part of a series of same title games, a gamepack including ALL of the games goes on sale for $19.99 regularly --- and I mean all of them.    I have seen all of the Valve games (60 plus of them) sold for $9.99.

Steam is crazy, which is where the movie clip came from.  Remember --only shoot the orcs that are over 60% off.    

Wait for the daily specials ...... and the free to play specials.

I have discussed it with several on here and it winds up being that they don't feel like they are technically up to it.

I keep telling them that Linux Mint 17 (Mate Edition) requires NO technical knowledge and is easier to use than Win XP used to be -- and is much easier than the current Windows versions.    Living with it, it just works much better than Windows.

Then I think how much I am going to grimace whenever people sign up for "free" Windows 10 knowing full well they are signing up for a subscription OS service that will hit them up periodically for a license fee and then will go do strange stuff to their computer without asking them about it (blame for that goes to the "customer requests" that nobody ever sees but MS).

Do you realize that over a third of the Win 10 Beta group ACTUALLY QUIT over one thing or another and MS just kept right on trucking over their typed protests followed by their feet walking away objections?    Many things about Win 10 are NOT customer approved at all.

MS isn't interested in your feedback, they just want the image of your "buying in" to the new Win 10 set-up so they can point to it at roll out time.

Given the very light uses people put computers to regularly, a Chromebook or Chromebox makes perfect sense for most "normal people".

One of the few areas that still lacks in the Chromebook idea is playing major games.   Now, what folks consider a major game differs so I'll pick my own case as "Worst Case" and talk about that.

I like immersive large area first person shooters.   These are the largest and most resource hoggish of the Triple AAA gaming world.   Now that Steam is rolling those titles over to SteamOS (which is Linux based and runs on all major distros now) I can get what I want on my little $80 refurbie Dell unit using my $47 Radeon video card using mid range settings.    

I can't do my Triple AAA games on Chromebooks, Chromeboxes or Chromekillers right now, but as processors and GPUs get stronger that may change in a year or two.

But, using the European trick of buying an old out of date American business PC and stripping the OS off the hard drive and then putting Linux Mint on it, I can get what I need (which will last for the rest of my life, most likely) for less than $150 put into it.

Steam is getting ready to do a major roll out push this summer on their own customized Linux boxes.   "My trick" will become completely main stream soon and all the kiddies will be scoping up all the dead white boxes out of all the family closets real soon.

Steam OS, Linux (and ChromeOS) runs like a scalded cat on hardware Windows just sputters on.    

Sad fact is that MS has shown no progress on this issue whatsoever during the entire Win 10 development process.    Hell, they can't put much more than half of Win 10 OS on the Chromekiller laptops they are currently selling, so they had to develop a trick to constantly swap in and out the various pieces of the OS over the internet as you needed them.    

This is absurd compared to a Chromebook or to Linux.   My whole Linux Mint world fits inside a 12 gig partition very easily and my current puny 80 gig hard drive is HUGE compared to my expansion needs.   I actually keep my old distro versions INTACT on my hard drive, should I ever need anything off the old  version I can boot it up and go get it .....   it is all there sitting complete with the installed programs and data files.

I have room out the ass at 80 gigs of hard drive space.

And remember, you can buy sd cards now a days with 200 gigs of space on them .....  and I own a 1 terabyte portable USB drive too (hooked up to my Simple TV so I can store all the taped shows I want).

 

Look at this and read #5 and realize that people are smart and can do whatever they want to spend the effort to do.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2691209/5-powerful-things-you-didnt-know-chrom...

Well I tried the chomebook, but you HAD to have wifi for the setup
guess who doesn't have wifi?
And my ISP want more for wifi per month
I could have set up wifi and then set up my chromebook IF my old comp hadn't been so buggered
I couldn't load the maint mate 16 i bought because the disc drive wouldn't work
no matter how you cut it, I needed a new PC, and guess what came on it? yup, win 8.1
seems to work ok, and I don't need to be a programmer to use it
it's a lot more computer than I need, but I needed one
right away cause my old Dell was about dead (it does live on, as a office only machine with no net access
no point getting the chromebook or box now, I done bought a new PC with a no brainer system so my stoopid self could use it
At some point I might go wireless, then look into a chromebook or box, right now there's no money

Oooooh !!!  a LARGE Linux Mint upgrade came through today, both of my browsers and a new Adobe Flash just came through as a major update -- and Fash never comes through complete, it always makes the unit go back to the repository after another update which is as large as the whole thing was the first time (duh, it is the whole thing all over again).

Two browsers and Flash (twice)  --  how long do you think it took on Linux Mint 17 mate?

Answer is 40 seconds done without me having to stop working, reboot or DO anything -- jest think about this a bit next time you have to deal with a MS update.

..... while you are locked down for 5-10 minutes totally while just moving the updates -- just waiting to be allowed to proceed at all, knowing you have a forced reboot or two coming up, and then another two reboots for the Flash updates, then a defrag for the hard drive since everything on your drive got scrambled by the major update which re-wrote all your MS operating files and all those big log.bin files.   Then comes the required virus update delay and then 15-20 minute "quick" scan to see if anything ugly came along with the updates.

I am done in 40 seconds with no reboot required, no defrag, no anti-virus scan, just painless and beautiful.

And with Chromebooks/boxes it would have been background all the way without you ever even seeing it at all.


                                                           just control + click a few times on the attached pic to blow it up big enough to see the seconds