[SueW170]

Thanks for your comments. The Big Fish story games which I would like to do haven't been programmed yet for Mac's latest OS (Snow Leopard, 10.6 and up). Other than that, there's not much I would use which isn't Mac compatible. MS Office for Mac is pretty much fully compatible and I can import and work with MS Word for PC and MS Excel for PC files with just a little adjustment of formatting features. Even that often isn't necessary. I'm not happy with the newest version of Print Shop, but that is a Print Shop issue and not a matter of Mac OS compatibility.

Originally Posted by lnthomp

I mostly don't play online games, so I can't comment in detail...Flash Player has minor differences in the Linux version that made a few things look different for a long time. Either the Flash Player updates have improved it, or the developers of Farm Town fixed something recently, or both, now FT looks the same on my computer as it does on my wife's WindowsXP computer.

There is a Linux version of Second Life that I've looked at, but don't play.

Linux has the same advantage as Macs in terms of viruses and malware--it just isn't as attractive a target, with the smaller market penetration. Linux has an additional advantage in that anyone with programming skills who discovers a way to fix a security flaw (or any bug for that matter) can submit the fix and have it available to Linux users everywhere in a matter of days, rather than having to wait for a monolithic company headquarters-released fix.

There is also the same disadvantage Macs have, which is if a company makes a proprietary Windows-based game (or other software), it simply won't work on Linux. Beyond that, most game companies work out ways to release Mac versions of their Windows software, but not so many find it worthwhile to make Linux versions.

But there are programmers around the world writing stuff for Linux all the time, and there aren't a lot of things that don't have either a Linux version or a Linux-based competitor with similar functionality. Some web sites claim to only work on Windows and Mac computers, but work fine in Linux. But tech support lines mostly refuse to have anything to do with Linux if you have issues, like with my internet service provider.