I dunno about A) and B) or D), but for C), Steam might run out of steam like Loki Games (?) did, and for E) Its great that people are enthusiastic about Linux as a gaming platform but there are not many people who are interested in paying for a game and that seems to be the reality.

I've never had a problem with the proprietary Nvidia drivers in Linux whenever I've had a genuine Nvidea card, Intel drivers for some ancient on-board Intel 740 (?) chipset really sucked big time. At least a few years ago, ATI was widely known for having poor Linux drivers as well. Framerates are comparable with Windows.

"Steam might run out of steam like Loki Games (?) did,"

. Maybe. But I have more faith in Valve. Besides times are changing. It used to be that people supported Linux more for a sense of ideal. Nowadays it's on it's way to becoming a compelling alternative to Microsoft and Apple.

From the same article you linked to : "Valve gets a huge kudos for the vision they have."

Carmack is an open source advocate big time. But this isn't necessarily just about open source (though he seems to use linux and open source interchangeably in that article). There are emerging markets founded on Linux today that have nothing to do with open source.

I have a bit to say on #2: Because I host a web show using Blip, Android comes up routinely because Blip's video players are random on Android-run mobile devices. Some of them work, some don't. I remember when Blip started using some new embedding code and I started implementing those on my website, and I immediately got three eMails: Two from people who could no longer view my videos on their Android phones, and one person who couldn't view them before on his phone who suddenly could.

The trouble is that mobile device manufacturers using Android make considerable changes to the OS for each device they make, which means certain hardware considerations are going to be vastly different from phone to phone, and Blip isn't a big enough company to be able to handle the constant influx of new devices and changes to existing devices. (And trust me, this is something they get bothered about on a regular basis. They would LOVE to have solid Android support.)

As for the rest:

1: I can see where Microsoft is going with Windows 8, but at the moment, AFAIK, you have to PAY for any software that goes on the metro tile wall. Until metro-apps can be obtained for free, this will completely turn-away services like Steam and anyone who wants to provide free software.

3: This would be a big thing for Linux users, but of course, you also need a library of games on Steam to take advantage of this. (At least, with any consistency. I'm aware there's stuff to run Windows DirectX apps on Linux.)

4: No opinion, know too little about it.

5: These are neat. I've never bought one because I'm really picky about what games I buy due to a lack of funds, but I'm not against having one of my games in such a bundle in the future once my newer projects are completed.

I've seen it quite a few times, but simply clicking more info and then "Run anyway" solves it. It would've been nice if you didn't have to click "More info" first.

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Desktop isn't going anywhere anytime soon, desktop apps can now be lIsted along side metro ones on the windows store and new guidelines have been put up on msdn related to desktop development nOt to mention API updates for Win32, 64, winsock and D2D and D3D(correct me if wrong?) desktop dev. And yes you can list metro apps as free.

If you don't like it, you can always go the other way.

Sure, you can list them as free apps, but in order to get something on the Windows Store in the first place you need to be signed up as a developer which costs $50 a year, at least for Canadians.

Yes, but again, that's not the "free" Kris was talking about.

I'll probably run Windows 8 in a VM at work at some point (around when the market share for IE-on-Windows-8 hits critical mass), but I think that will be about it.

Anyway, my $0.02 OT:

A) It looks like Microsoft is doing their best to kill the Windows platform, but I doubt they will succeed. They still have a massive momentum going for them, and even if 8 costs them OS market share, most of the losses are most likely going to OS X, not anything Linux-based. Still, if it helps shake up the OS landscape, I'm all for it. Who knows, maybe we'll see serious HaikuOS usage in a few years

B) Android runs on a Linux kernel, but when people say "linux" in a discussion about operating systems, they usually mean "GNU/Linux" or "A Linux-based OS with a UNIX-style userland". So while the fact that Android uses a Linux kernel means a lot for kernel development (because many of the enhancements made by the android team and community flow back into the upstream kernel), I doubt it helps Linux-based operating systems a lot. Other smartphone OSes could benefit from Android in the long run, but until these become usable, I don't see a lot of benefit for myself (except that there is an alternative to iOS with a slightly less fascist marketing strategy).

C) I consider this a symptom rather than a motor; the "serious" gaming market has been a dangerous place for companies for a while now, profit margins are shrinking, production costs explode, while casual gaming, by comparison, has a potential for much higher returns on much smaller investments. This also means that serious gamers have become a relatively unattractive target for a company that makes most of their revenue by selling OS licenses, so naturally Microsoft is abandoning the serious gaming arena and moving towards casual gaming (which is something Windows 8 is probably still a very suitable platform). This, in turn, means that a company like Valve that does target serious gamers, has to go look for other options, and there aren't too many of those - OS X maybe, a handful of popular Linux distros, and that's about it. Additionally, the "serious gamer" population has a large overlap with the computer geek crowd, where most of the Linux users are anyway; I know just too many people who keep a windows partition around for gaming alone, and I doubt many of them will migrate to 8.

D) Completely unsure about this one. On the one hand, a "store" might be the thing to have these days because everyone else does, so this might help pull people away from proprietary OSes; but on the other hand, it is a very un-UNIXy thing to do, and it creates a barrier between the way things have been working for over a decade (and successfully so) and the "Ubuntu way". I'd love to see Ubuntu as a "gateway drug" into free software land, but the way they are going lately looks more like they're turning it into yet another proprietary OS (just with a cuddlier name). Apart from that, I kind of oppose the whole selling restrictive software licenses market model; nothing wrong with being paid for making software, but using copyright law as an enforcement technique to get paid feels wrong to me, and an alledgedly "free" OS playing into this hand doesn't really sit comfortable with me.

E) Pretty much the same as C. Symptom more than an opportunity, although the fact that serious games start to appear for Linux-based OSes probably does work catalytically.

On the whole, I think all these are more symptoms of the state of Free Software in general and the Linux kernel in particular: Linux has reached a state of incredible maturity, and Free Software is, in many fields, a real alternative, despite many efforts from the proprietary-software camp to prevent this.

I don't know if anybody mentioned this, but in their effort to port TF2 to GNU/Linux VALVe said that they have been working directly with the GPU vendors (I'm pretty certain both ATI and Nvidia were mentioned, but possibly Intel too) and together have found and fixed a number of bugs and bottlenecks in the Linux drivers. In fact, IIRC, last I heard they said that in Ubuntu Linux running TF2 with OpenGL was actually faster than running TF2 in Windows with both DirectX and OpenGL. IOW, if VALVe continues to drive this the Linux drivers might end up being better than the Windows drivers, and we already know Linux runs faster than Windows.