so im building a gaming PC and im running up against my budget and i want to know how Linux is for gaming/editing/streaming, or if i should just cough up the hundred bucks for windows 7. if there are any other OS out there that you think i should use that would be much apreciated as well
While steam is available for Linux, very few games are actually available. If you want to game, windows is unfortunately essential at this point, though that might change in a year or two.
I think the same is true for editing as well, not alot of editing programs will run on linux
Ask yourself what games you want to play, ask yourself what editing software you want to use, then ask yourself what streaming software/hardware you want to use. Then try to figure out if any of those things you want to do, can be done (natively) on Linux. I say natively because, well, not running things natively is usually just a headache.
linux is good for everything but gaming.... so i guess windows. people still buy windows?
Why not have both?
I'd say both. I haven't had a desktop or laptop in a few years that doesn't have at least 2 OS's on it.
Even the games that have been ported to linux but are not open source/linux native, run faster in Windows, most commercial games in Linux are jus nothing like the modern Windows games. That is not to say that you can't game in Linux, if you have a really powerful machine you can even run quite a few games in Wine, but you won't get the performance of Windows. I often fire up a server and play Red Eclipse or Alien Arena with some friends, it's quite satisfactory because it runs fast on every system with huge framerates, whatever the specs, but the graphics are not near the level of modern AAA Windows game titles.
The same goes for editing. There is no real linux alternative for Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Video and photo editing workflow is Windows/Mac territory.
Vector and bitmap editing is quite good in linux. Gimp 2.8 has all the base functions of Adobe Photoshop CS5 and then some. Gimp 2.8 has some really cool features that make the workflow more efficient for certain popular tasks than Adobe Photoshop CS5. GIMP is also ridiculously fast and is compatible with any file format necessary for prepress etc.
I've been using GNU/Linux since 1996, but I also dual boot, I just keep a clean Windows 7 install for games and Lightroom (I also have a Lightroom install in Wine on my linux box, and it works, but not as nice as in Windows). Linux does a lot of things much better than Windows, Linux is just more modern and efficient.
I think Windows still is necessary for now, for games and Adobe stuff though.
@OP
If you want to go the very time consuming route that I am, use Linux and try to install everything you want to use, games, apps, etc. Wine is incredibly easy to use, all I have to do if I want to use an .exe or .msi or whatever, is click on it and Wine fires it right up. SO FAR, I haven't had any gaming issues, but I still have dozens of hours of testing and research that I will eventually post to help people decide if they want to use Linux over Windows. Apps also runs pretty good too, but with open-source alternatives such as LibreOffice(MS Office), there is almost no need for any paid programs with Linux unless you really want them. You can install straight from AppCafe or whatever your distro uses and when an upgrade releases, it will auto install or let you know, but you don't have to go an DL an update for something like iTunes. It is so fucking easy and smooth there is almost no excuse to not use Linux unless your hardware or drivers don't work so well in it.
in my experience, even though steam has games for linux and should be able to run any game in wine
on windows i can play tf2 at mostly max setting in 1366/768, on ubuntu i cant play it at lowest possible settings at lowest possable resolution (720p)
so yeah, untill steam starts pushing hard for linux, it just wont work
You shouldn't be having those issues, especially not with a Valve game. Your Wine settings might be fucked up or you could have VESA drivers instead of OEM drivers for Linux.
it's the linux version, not running in wine
and i'm using the amd "experemental beta" driver aka the only one that works
Yep, the AMD drivers right now are fucking terrible. I have learned this the hard way as well. Supposedly it will be fixed soon as I think its Xorg that plan to release drivers that have 3d acceleration for AMD cards.