There’s a joke that says there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can’t.

There’s another way to divvy up the population of the earth, in technophile terms: those who absolutely fret over minute details of performance in their games, and those who don’t.

I belong to the latter group. My last real gaming addiction was Neverwinter Nights, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I still occasionally start it up again for a day or two at a time. That game is at least a decade beyond its prime, and hardly going to stress any of the hardware available today.

It’s true, I do occasionally lose a few hours of my life slapping around the computer in an eight-way free-for-all in Warzone 2100, or dabbling with 0ad. But I’m no hardcore gamer, not by a long shot. Heck, the games I play most these days rely on text and telnet.

I’ve also had the unfortunate experience of shepherding more than one gamer into the shallow waters of Linux adoption. I say “unfortunate” because I would guess that 90 percent of the time, if not more, it ends in a dissatisfied customer.

And the reason again goes back to those two kinds of people, and how much they’re willing to sacrifice in performance terms. Players who measure performance by fractions of frames-per-second are, in my experience, generally unwilling to make the leap if it means suffering through 198 frames per second with Wine, instead of 206 in Windows 8. Even though your eye probably can’t see the difference. 🙄

In my meager opinion, what’s at play here is actually a sidelong game of geek poseur, and suffering an 8-frame-per-second hit is a blackball to the upper echelons. That doesn’t surprise me.

But I know enough now, and I’ve seen enough failed converts to realize, that there’s no point in offering up enlightenment if the applicant is going to measure their satisfaction in hundredths of frames per second. I don’t sell life stories to have them divided up into individual words, and rejected as statistically insignificant.

I’ve even gone so far these days as to make a complete 180-degree turn on the issue, and shy people away from Linux if I suspect they belong to that first group of people. I know, the revolution needs converts, but something tells me the candidate’s heart isn’t in the game. Or maybe it is, and that’s the problem.

But it wouldn’t be fair for me to give advice I wouldn’t follow myself, so I make a clear division between the games I’ll play in Linux, and the ones I devote to a leftover Windows machine.

Yes, I keep a castoff XP laptop in a closet, and when the time comes, I bring it out and dust off the cover. It’s not networked, it holds no personal information, I don’t worry about anti-virus software, and I’ve stripped out everything but the essential drivers. I’m comfortable with that.

My point is, at this stage of life, it’s most convenient to me to have a Linux side of the house, and an abandoned XP machine in the closet for those rare times when I can dawdle with a game of Deus Ex. And never the twain shall meet.

That may be a solution for you too. There’s no shame in it. I said a long time ago, if you want to eat toast, you buy a toaster. And I’m guessing your kitchen has more than just a toaster in it. 😉