First off, I'd just like to say “Thank you!” to The Vagabond, for allowing me to join his prestigious blog. I hope I will not fail you, Lord Vagabond (for the last time...).
Firstly, a little about me: I am a nerd, addicted to tea, and prefer a lack of physical activity.
Also, Mekapaedia does have a meaning: “Meka” is a Japanese word for “Mechanical, involving robotics, computers and transportation.” (or so I've read, this was the precursor to “Mecha”) and “-paedia” means “knowledge/education” and the “ae” is simply the British spelling.
There we go, you now know me. On to the show...
...I will begin with something that will become commonplace from me: rants on computers.
Now, I used to be a big gamer when I was younger. I disliked XP (and non-windows OSs) for the longest time in favour of Windows 98 because it didn't play any games. All the games I played (it was like... early 2000s) ran on 95 to ME, not 2000/XP, because 2000/XP used the NT Kernel. See, from Windows 1, it was really MS-DOS with a window manager (graphics), similarly to Linux. But the NT kernel was a completely new OS without MS-DOS, a fully graphical OS, and didn't actually allow you to directly access the hardware (a la HAL.dll), making the OS more stable, but more sluggish. NT was released around the time of Windows 3.1, and is the current kernel behind all the recent releases of Windows (XP, Vista, 7). Anywho, I didn't like it. So I tried to stay with 98 until it decided that it didn't work very well any more (as Windows does) and I got a new computer. With XP. I quickly got used to it, and indeed, XP is the best Windows yet. And now, everything runs on XP, and the compatibility mode allows some older games to work. But more and more over the years, I've started to game less and less. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but it's probably an amalgamation of things. What do I do instead? I watch TV shows online, and I play with Linux.
Yep, Linux.
I personally find Linux much fun: something doesn't work, there's an answer, but you have to research and figure it out. It is wonderful for the mind. Eventually, I hope to set up a Linux sever in my basement, but that will be a while, because I have things to do and things to learn. Anyway, since this is a gaming blog, I may as well dispel two myths about Linux: 1: It's hard to use, and 2: It doesn't play any games.
1: This is so ridiculously untrue it's not even funny: sure, you can get Arch Linux and try and command line everything, but even that just takes some time (and another computer to look up stuff with), but the vast majority of Distros (different versions of Linux, there are hundreds) out there have window managers (Graphical user interfaces, GUIs) that are as easy, if not easier then Windows's. Seriously, download an Ubuntu LiveCD and try it for yourself. I think the GUI is even better and easier to use then Windows. And prettier. There are lots of effects that the GUI can do, ones that make Vista look dull, and yet it still takes less system resources then Vista. Huh. And seriously, try out Ubuntu (or Linux Mint, that one's good too). http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download for Ubuntu and http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php for Linux Mint.
2: Depends what you want to do. Due to the nature of the Linux community, there are many, many free games (FPS, Racing, RTS, RPG, etc...) that you can get. Most of them Open Source, so if you wanted to help you, you could! But that's not what most people want. They want the games everyone else is playing. They want Windows games. And do they run on Linux? Well... yes. Yes they do. Well, some of them, at least, thanks to Wine. Wine is a Windows compatibility layer (don't say emulator, they don't like that...) that allows the usage of Windows programs. What works? Well, off the front page of the AppsDB: Guild Wars, Baldur's Gate, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Counter Strike Source, Team Fortress 2, EVE Online, Command and Conquer 3, Call of Duty 4... etc, etc... the list goes on. Sure, it's doesn't play everything, and sure, it have to type “wine whatever_program.exe” to start it, but it is gaming on Linux. And Linux doesn't really have many viruses. Also, there is a distro made exclusively for gaming, called “linuX-Gamers LiveDVD”. It's a DVD that runs the OS (it can install, but you don't have to) and it loaded with games. Don't worry, it has a GUI... http://live.linux-gamers.net/?s=download for linuX-Gamers LiveDVD and http://winehq.org/download/ for Wine.
Well, that about sums it up. I'm going to try the Windows 7 Beta soon, I'll tell you how that does. In fact, I'm re-partitioning my hard drive and installing multiple OSs (Windows 7 included), so we'll see how that goes.
-Mekapaedia
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