Linux is too much effort and gives you no advantages. FreeBSD and solaris on the other hand give you nice benefits for all that extra work so I use them in SPECIFIC Applications...
Well, i can say that i like very much Solaris... very simple install and everything work directly on my computer...
About Linux, when compared to Windows, there is certainly some advantage...
The first one, related to these topic, you have not these 2gb limit !!!
Second, if you have a good bios, several of the option for speed up your system have a flag "don't work with windows"... a good example, very interesting for game, is the bios option called "Discrete MTRR Allocation"... these option allow faster graphic on system with more that 4gb ram... work with any Unix based system ( Linux, Solaris, FreeBSB, MAC OS, etc... ) but don't work with Windows...
In fact, my second prefered game, sins of solar empire, run better on Linux that on Windows... it is true today but it was not true when the game was launched ( no multiplayer on Linux )... Linux have evolve and it have become possible to enjoy fully the game...
My main complain with Linux is that slowly, it become like windows product... i mean software with bug who need a lot of patch ( kb ) for have a 100% stable system... Debian being the exception but being several version back... Solaris is for me the top OS in stability... MAC OS is nothing more that a bad rip off of FreeBSD with some cute GUI...
These topic show a lot of different point of view... and none of these point of view are wrong... nothing is black or white, all is a shade of gray... i think that gamers are ready to move for the new generation but the majority of industry are not ready... by industry, i don't mean computer/software industry but usual business... imagine a business with 100 computer connected to a central server with 32 processor... this is a total of 132 processor... it mean 132 Win7 licence... add to this new software... not the cheap one at 50$ like game but professional software at 100 or 1000 $$$ ... upgrade now for a lot of business mean a lot of money to be spend... not really something good in the actual economical world crisis... at the people level, a lot of them have loose their job, some have difficulty for pay house/car/etc... upgrade to Windows 7 and spend money is not really a priority for them...