Well, in a couple of months time, it's going to be "run linux or buy an xbone", because Valve/Steam is apparently doing a lot of work on the LLVM LLDB debugger, which is primarily a MacOS/iOS debugger for C/C++ that also works in Linux (but Valve is working on making it better for Linux). The LLVM suite is very nice, and it's a kind of BSD-license, so not GNU/GPL, which is probably why Steam is doing so much work on it, because these things can be used for closed source (commercial game) development, whereas GNU/GPL tools, if they are used to develop applications, make it mandatory for that application to follow the GPL license and open source the code, which Valve obviously doesn't want for commercial gaming software.
It's clear that Steam is frantically developing the tools for next gen linux/BSD game development. However, the LLVM suite is not available for the windows platform, so the next gen games will be linux/BSD (PC/Devices) and BSD (MacOS/iOS) only. Windows will not be able to participate in the next evolution of the gaming experience.
I think that Valve will probably release a "Steam BSD"-license variant of the LLVM suite, that uses the benefits of the tools in it, but at the same time locks the use of the decompiler tool and other tools that may expose the code of the games that are developed using the toolkit.
After QDOS&MS-DOS 1981-1994, MS-Windows 1985-2000 (GUI shell on MS-DOS), now MS&IBM-NT&OS/2 1993-2013 (not on top of MS-DOS), it's fascinating to see a company that has made nothing itself but bought/stole everything from others (Bill Gates only made a BASIC-interpreter for IBM, he didn't make BASIC though, that was made more than 10 years before):
- MS-DOS was bought from QDOS for a mere 25kUSD in 1981!
- MS-Windows (shell) was copied from Visicorp and Apple over a period of several years
- MS-Windows NT was basically IBM OS/2, but it was a very clever deal by Bill Gates: IBM had to develop the first and second versions of the operating system, which they did, and afterwards, Microsoft would develop a third version, but IBM ceased development on it just after Linux was born, and considered the operating system a dead end, and Microsoft bought out IBM for relatively cheap to end the name "OS/2" in 1993, and renamed the whole thing Windows NT, and then renamed it again and again without changing the technology, and now they are at Windows 8.1 and still selling it in 2013, 20 years later.
So basically, Apple still had Woz in the early days, and he did a lot of innovative things, until Jobs went on coke and Woz retired, and Apple started looting instead of innovating, but Microsoft has never innovated in any way, they have bought or stolen everything, guess Ballmer went on coke almost immediately, and Gates almost immediately started doing charity work to reduce the tax rate on the huge plus value on his initial 25000 USD investment...
And even though the concept of Linux is not new, as it is a UNIX clone (technology from the sixties), at least it was completely coded (in machine language no less!) by Linus Thorvalds, the guy that still supervises the linux kernel.
I will consider it natural justice when Microsoft would go down. They have stopped innovation with their marketing shit long enough, it's time for some real products by real people now, so that technology can finally advance...