“I was pointing out that the distinction between editing HTML with a raw text editor or IDE (as you prefer) vs using a WYSIWYG graphical web-page-builder tool is a very similar difference”

ohhh I get it. Yeah that makes more sense than what I thought you were saying.

You misunderstood my analogy from HTML editing to LaTeX: I was not implying that LaTeX is good at making web pages; LaTeX doesn’t really do that at all and is only good for creating .pdf documents and slide show presentations. I was pointing out that the distinction between editing HTML with a raw text editor or IDE (as you prefer) vs using a WYSIWYG graphical web-page-builder tool is a very similar difference to usign a markup-driven document editor (LaTeX or Sphinx) over a graphical WYSIWYG document creation tool (Word or LibreOffice).

I didn’t mention the Humble Bundle, but I don’t think that was critical to mention. It’s great for what it is, and they are helping push Linux game development.

I mean that’s some interesting things and I’d love to debate the usefulness or lack there of regarding a central software repository (because honestly it just doesn’t make any sort of sense to me) but honestly it’s all moot to us from the outside. We the gaming community (mostly) don’t care about the developer’s working environment. We don’t care what language the games are programmed in, We don’t care how easy or hard it is on one OS vs another. We are like a web browser. It’s all about the end resulting presentation. I’d wager 90% of the hardcore community doesn’t care about the design aspects except to predict and prehate/prelove games based on the likelihood of their delivering a ‘flawless’ experience. That is to say they only care that the Xbox is easier to develop for because it means less clipping and not that say the OS has better memory allocation.

LaTeX? I really do need to look into LaTeX more because while I’ve heard of it used for things like publishing markup or unique situations like writing in science and math I would never use it for word processing. At least I wouldn’t think to use it for a Word replacement. Btw Google Docs is nice and all but it’s always extremely presumptuous to suggest an online tool. I work with a lot of people who go offline for various reasons. I am one of those people. We are the forgotten, and that frustrates the snot out of me.

You seem to imply LaTeX’s usefulness for web page creation. While I agree the WYSIWYG editors are terrible for web creation. I actually prefer to do mine (what little I do) in a simple text editor environment. Notepad++ on Windows, TextWrangler on Mac and I would search for something similar on Linux and I’ve always gotten the impression that LaTeX is something more complex, when I’m writing html I generally don’t need that.

I am interested in trying Linux one day but I’ll need a second computer. There’s a lot I use, that I can only use on Windows as is. Even more importantly when someone asks me to do something I need to be able to run various windows programs. Like for instance when someone gives me a phone to “get the photos off” I normally have software for at last count 5 major phone companies just for such an occasion. I’m not sure how I could do any of that on Linux when these are not the new hotness phones.. these are old busted phones. We buy phones out right in my circles. So no $500 iPhones, or $600 Samsung Galaxy *Numeral* more like my $95 Nokia Neuron or my sisters $120 Samsung Gravity 2. I may get a knock off Chinese device like a phone or a KIRF iPod and the only official software is windows based, and sometimes old tech does that extremely annoying that where it has the software built in and mounts like mass storage but partitioned so you can only see the software and not the target data. How is Linux for working with old tech?

I remember the one time I tried a Knoppix Live CD (and same with Ubuntu) it wouldn’t connect to the internet wirelessly. The fact that I couldn’t get online to find out what was wrong or how to fix it kinda just killed it for me. That was somewhere 2003-2007 though.

One major thing you’ve neglected in your article is Humble Bundle. Humble Indie Bundle by Wolfire, who got (in my opinion) WAY WAY WAY too much hate for their Humble THQ Bundle (I mean seriously people were going nuts over ONE bundle you’d have thought Torvalds took a CEO position at Microsoft in the Windows Phone dept), has otherwise delivered substantial quality games for the Linux platform in a consistent manner that I think hasn’t really been seen before.

That said, linux gaming may come in custom distros, which should not really be hard for developers, the distros can be as small as a few hundred megabytes and run on flash disks or CD. These distros will remove any bloatware and unnecessary OS elements for the ultimate performance, here’s a developer perspective on Linux advantages for game programming:
http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2013/01/kotaku-report-valves-steam-pc-getting.html