I'm not a gamer and didn't know that Steam is a platform. Thanks for the info. Although he said nasty stuff about Modern UI that he won't port Steam to, almost any program that runs on Vista or 7 runs on 8 Desktop. Is there something about Steam that won't run on Windows 8 Desktop? And if it's a platform won't its game developers demand support for the overwhelming majority that they can sell to?

I believe your statement that many great games already play on Linux, but I know a lot of gamers who have sunk Real Money into massive collections of Windows games that they're not going to give up. I know lots of Linux users at work but when they go home they play games on Windows, dedicated consoles, or phones.

With Client Hyper-V in Windows 8 it should be pretty easy to set up a Linux system running on Windows 8 to run Linux games that aren't available for Windows. With that Windows 8 just might help accelerate Linux use, but it will take some time. This thread is in response to predictions for 2013. As much as I'd like to see Linux grow beyond the server and appliance markets, I don't see gaming on Linux growing much next year.