Bringing up my own example of reductio ad absurdum in arguing that our reasons for not supporting Linux are bad is kinda shoddy. We have actual reasons; you may or may not agree with them, but they're substantially better than you're indicating. And you know that, too.

That's one. Another is, we sell *long term* support for our games; when you buy a title from us, you don't just buy a game. You buy into the fact that, five years from now, you will still be able to play that game you bought from us. In Linux, that's a little harder to feel comfortable guaranteeing than we do in other OSes.

Finally (and most importantly for us) is that support and testing cost money, and unless we support just one distro--which is not something that we want to do as we were evaluating supporting at least two if not three--that's money multiplied by each distro we add. And until we can find a cheaper, more automated way to test and remaster games for Linux, we can't do it and make money at it.

You are correct; we only promise our games work on computers we have seen them working on. More importantly, we only support platforms we can regress bugs on. :)

The core problem is how very little we automate on any platform, not that Linux is more challenging to automate on. So until we get better at that, Linux isn't a great platform for us.

That's more or less exactly what I've been saying, yes.

Look: you can't deny that Mac is a larger market share than Linux, right? And we made the decision to move to Mac because it would make good business sense. Now, since Linux is not as big a market share as Mac, until we get better at how we work at testing and build mastering, we cannot move to Linux and not lose money in the process. You can argue that we could just toss a tarball up on our website and let you figure out the details yourself and I have reiterated many times that is not an acceptable solution for us because it does not fit into our philosophy of business.

This isn't ridiculous. It's the truth. I don't see why this continues to be a bone of contention.

EDIT: And dirtyharry50's right. We're waaaaaay afield of topic here. So may I suggest, if you want to continue this, look me up on IRC (where I see you often enough) or via PM.