Eh, switching from Fedora to Ubuntu would not be a big deal at all. The differences really are quite minimal and the actual install would take what, half an hour tops? The effort to install a windows partition would be much higher.
I think they are responding to the suggestion that Valve releases their own distro.
Would certainly take me significantly more than half an hour to switch to Fedora though since I would need to re-learn the package manager, move all my settings across and figure out the subtle differences in configuration etc.
Valve releasing their own distro would be just craaaaaazy. That would be like Amazon or Google doing it. Why bother? There is an awesome one out there for free (Ubuntu).
If Valve wants to make their own console, which is the more likely case, they can license Ubuntu support for cheaper than they could make a terrible distro and it would be win-win-win (which is, of course, better than a win-win scenario).
If you keep a seperate /home the process is greatly streamlined. I've had the same one through countless ubuntu , gentoo, and fedora installs. Just have to swap out your / and recreate your user.
The only real differences in package management for I'd say 95% of use cases is if you type 'yum' or 'apt-get' before typing 'install whatever'.
From a gamers perspective, Win/ is great but if Win( comes with all that mobile UI stuff Linux (I don't care about which version exactly) will have quite a chance. Given decent drivers for the hardware and being open but not having to much over head will exactly be what a lot of gamers want, it will be running games.
If someone comes up with a upgradeable open pc-based console of sort running steam, well THIS could be the final nail in the traditional PCs coffin. Actually loving playing games on a desktop I hope that doesn't happen any time soon!
Very true, this reminds me of the failed Corel Linux years back.
If the attitude towards fragmentation is to fork a new distro for every application, am I supposed to restart my computer every time I want to task switch or run hundreds of virtual machines?
There are some specialised situations where a custom distro makes sense, like appliance type applications (smoothwall, backtrack etc)
http://xkcd.com/927/
Anybody willing to switch distros just to run a game might as well just install a Windows partition.