One more thing regarding windows-Linux compression.

Let's see the rising technology of the decade. Smart phones. And as far as I know, There are 3 leading operating systems; Android, IOS and Windows. You might have heard that both Android and IOS are Linux based. Why do you think they are a lot faster and more stable and windows phones?

That's one of the reasons Microsoft is desperately trying to maintain the balance by forcing people to use windows 10 on both their phones and windows. That trick did not work. In fact it back fired. Have you noticed the Linux or Free-Dos operating system market share in the last decade and how it inclined compared to earlier?

EDIT: Apparently I was mistaken about ios being based on Linux. Maybe we can say they are cousins.

iOS is not Linux based.

You are right. Thanks for the heads up.

Most of your reply was not relevant to the topic, but thanks for the bit that was. I really don't want this topic to turn in a general Windows vs Linux discussion, as I am sure we have all been there at some point over the years.

It seems you have not come across 7-Zip, which is freeware or open source, and is a very popular and powerful easy-to-use windows program for seeing to all your zipping needs. Don't leave home without it.

EDIT
I see 7-Zip was later also mentioned by another responder, to which you replied., and my response to that, is that I have always found it easy, it does indeed have password ability, which I use regularly, though to be clear, usually via a BAT file. It has a great command-line ability as well.

As Timboli (OP) has mentioned, let us not turn this into Linux vs. Windows but rather discuss the very good questions bought up by Timboli & others.

P.S 7-zip might have a crappy UI but it's simplicity and context menu cannot be beaten, especially by some bloated commercial tool.

Yes, though I think it's important to put the topic in the greater scope of why some of us use Linux which has reasons that span far beyond gaming.

If I wanted the most user-friendly gaming platform humanly possible (without concerns for DRM, openness, future access to my games and generally the future of the ecosystem I use), I'd probably just get a console.

As I said, that has already be done here there and everywhere, many times over for years, so no need to repeat again,

If you really want to be effective with your view, address games specifically, because that might be where actions speak louder than words.

Mmmm that might seem that way on the surface, but most require an Internet connection, and even updating before playing. And nothing is simple about backing up and replacing HDDs or swapping machines. So DRM-Free they are not, and Openness they are not, and not future proof in any real meaningful way. Once your console dies, as it will eventually, there is no guarantee of support with future consoles. And right now, many console games are still disc based initially, or an imposing download.

That said, aren't consoles usually running on some kind of similar to Linux/Unix backend?

Older consoles are technically DRM-free because you could just duplicate the games by creating images of the disk or cartridge and flashing them.

By the way, Consoles rarely use actual stuff from OSes as backend, I think Xbox is the good example of an exception, which usually uses some of Window's kernel.

Some things to note:

Android does use Linux (the kernel), but it does not use the GNU userland that is generally associated with Linux. This means that you can't actually run GNU/Linux programs on Android unless you supply enough of the GNU userland to get it to run (for example, by rooting the system and installing Debian in a chroot).

Interestingly enough, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows the GNU/Linux userland to run on Windows, but it technically isn't Linux as it doesn't include the Linux kernel; rather, Microsoft wrote a subsystem for the Windows kernel that implements the Linux ABI and the ELF executable format, but which contains no Linux code.

Of course, you could just use WSL, but you might argue that it's cheating for purposes of this discussion (do you consider WINE, which is similar but in the opposite direction, to be cheating here?). There also exists cygwin.

Actually, copy protection (which I consider to be a form of DRM) has been a feature of consoles from the NES days. Note that the NES has a chip (the 10NES) that exists solely to prevent unlicensed games from running on the NES. The Famicom Disk System has a "Nintendo" logo inside that must match the "Nintendo" logo on the disk for it to run. Game Boy games must contain a Nintendo logo (or at least half of one, as it turns out) or the game will not boot. I believe at least one Sega system also had a mechanism where, if the cartridge doesn't say it's licensed by Sega, the game won't run.

(Of course, these early copy protection methods are easy to spoof.)

Anyway, if you care about DRM-free, I can think of a good reason to use Linux over Windows; Windows is DRM-encumbered since XP, Linux is not. (There is something called DRM in the Linux kernel, but it's not the same thing; it stands for Direct Rendering Manager, I believe.)

If I wanted to be really effective, I'd spend time (or hire someone to spend time) coding a super-friendly GUI layer on top of at least one of the popular distros (even better if you can make it cross-distro) to allow you to manage Linux effectively strictly from a GUI.

Then, I'd hire people to expand the linux driver-space so that everything runs seemlessly.

However, it requires time and resources that I currently don't have. Maybe if I make it big at some point in the future, how knows?

Consoles, like Windows, are not friendly if you care about long-term access, long term preservation or customized use cases.

They are VERY user-friendly if your access pattern falls into the short-term identical use case of ~90% of the user-base.

And herein lies the problems:

- 90% of the userland want it short term now and don't notice the less immediately tangile benefits a platform like Linux brings

- 90% of the geeks deving on Linux (yours truly included) are either busy trying to breakthrough in the application space (usually making some distributed web/mobile app with a backend) or making fancy stuff for other geeks that won't really appeal to the common masses. They don't spend much of their time making Linux a more usable platform for non-technical users, which makes me wonder why some people bash on Canonical with Ubuntu as they are one of the few players actually doing that.

Here, the 90% figures are of course an educated guess, but you get the idea.

That's not strictly true in regards to Windows.

I still have a Win 98SE PC and a Win XP PC, so plenty of longevity there for any games that run on those or DOS.

And as GOG have shown, many games can be tweaked to run on newer Windows versions, and I imagine will continue to do so .... certainly while GOG want to remain relevant in their current market.