Haha, tbh, looking at the pricing for current-gen AAA games (with various editions), $20 is actually very cheap. But, hey, that’s just me 
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I agree $20 is an okay price for a game…
Twenty years ago, PC games (and even PS1 / PS2 games) were close to $80 AUD here - that was a ripoff! No wonder there was so much piracy… We had our playstations chipped, and hired games then burnt them to CD… and $80 was a lot more money back then than it is now…
Since the advent of Steam, and much more reasonable prices, I actually buy ALL the games I play! I think I paid $48 for the whole Age of Empires II HD with all the expansions to play using Wine/Proton on SteamPlay… Never bought it before - 20 years ago I played pirated copies of AoE and AoE 2…
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Same experiences here. 
Irwin, we’re all cheap to varying degrees. I learned 50 or 60 years ago not to jump on the fastest horse but to wait until it slows down.
I’m only kidding. We all have an Entertainment budget. Everyone focused on the “cost” of the game. My point was that it is a “game”, hence not a “necessity”. I put quotes around that last one because I can already feel the heat of those flames!
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I agree with you. Why would the people who can afford to buy very costly supercomputers run linux as their OS of choice when they can buy the grand daddy (cost wise) of Windows or IOS. Cheap mentality no doubt of these research fellows.
Have you considered the security, reliability, speed, multitasking ability etc of Linux before making the remark? Desktop Linux has the same qualities as Linux OS (modified to their requirements mostly) of these super computers.
I believe in the philosophy of open source and use Linux, though I am a dud about computing and do not touch the hidden files of the OS. I am sure there are many more like me who believe in the philosophy of open source and use Linux or any other open source OS even if they can easily afford proprietary OS and applications.
Unfortunately, the military industrial complex will try its best to snuff out all such initiatives where they cannot make a profit.
Most of the people do not go to town advertising their direct or indirect support for the open source projects/ applications.
Your comment would be laughable if it were not for the aspersions you cast on the users of Linux.
yashpal, I don’t see any ‘aspersions.’ I just see a slightly tongue in cheek discussion between Linux users poking a little fun at themselves. Linux has many virtues and you enumerate them nicely. Windows, alas, is bested by Linux in all aspects except cost. And therein lies the fun of ‘Are Linux users cheap?’
My computer usage is fairly simple and uncomplicated–communication, curiosity, finances, humor. Linux is perfect and costs nothing. I possess a Windows machine for gaming because it was cheaper than an Xbox. When I come across an XP machine being abandon, I ask for it. The first step is to flush it of all Windows and personal data. Then I upload whatever Linux distro works best with the old machine (Peppermint can be a great choice) and donate it to the local thrift shop as a working machine, requesting ‘save it for a poor student.’
My answer, still, is that Linux users are proudly cheap!
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I do not agree with you that Microsoft Windows bests Linux in all aspects (except cost). Linux was developed as OS for Servers, not as a desktop OS and relied totally on command line which the average user was not able to master easily. Windows, on the other hand, was a desktop OS from the beginning and being proprietary, other proprietary application makers readily integrated with it. It was profit all round. The GUI was the reason for windows to capture the market.
For a normal user, with not much reliance on proprietary applications, Linux is almost perfect desktop OS. In fact, some of the applications in Linux are better than many proprietary applications in windows. The basic reason that many applications in linux are not as good as in windows is that they are free and work of part time developers out of love for open source. Make them paid and see the tremendous improvement.
I never played any computer game in my life and may never, so I am unable to comment on this aspect.
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yashpal: don’t believe I said that Windows bests Linux–you read it backwards. We agree that the lack of proprietary applications puts Linux ahead and that the advent of the GUI was the most important development in user-level computing. Well, the mouse was pretty important, too, but it was a simultaneous development.
Gaming seems to be a different fork in software development. I should have probably bought a game console instead of a Windows box except that I caught a fabulous sale on the gaming box.
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The fact that Linux desktops, are basically a GUI tacked on to a server operating system is my favourite thing about Linux! Why on earth would you want to shoehorn “server features” into a desktop operating system, I detest Windows as a server platform…
Linux - when your GUI dies, you’ve still got a shell… Windows, when your GUI dies, you’re up sh_t creek 
with only a ctrl-alt-delete-paddle…
X was available and useable as a desktop GUI first time I ever tried Linux, Slackware 3.0 in 1995… it was actually better and more useable than some of the more proprietary X implementations (e.g. CDE on Solaris or Digital UNIX) - and certainly better than Windows NT 3.51 (I won’t mention Windows 95, 'cause it was a hokey 16 bit windowing system with some 32 bit extensions, on top of what started as a single tasking 8 bit operating system that would NEVER need more than 640 KB of RAM )…
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Just installed a Debian server for a friend over here. It’s still WIP, and it should start to work early january.
It will be the private data holder (I wouldn’t call it cloud) of a very small company, which wants to avoid googledrive.
So, my friend bought the hardware, I delivered the software.
It runs Seafile server 7.0.5 deployed with MySQL, NGINX (SSL enabled)
Now during the first tests we added some load, started heavy syncing from 3 different computers at the same time. The memory consumption on Debian barely hit the 1 GB ceiling (mostly taken by MySQL), while the installed amount is 4GB. My friend (Windows addicted) didn’t believe, there’s any life below 8 GB :)))
I think Linux users are (and Linux itself is) spary or economical, but not cheap.
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The true statement should be " Linux users are hard to loot ". It is a common practice to discredit whom you cannot take advantage of.
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So true for so many aspects in life. This reminds me of how certain groups of humans are always displayed as evil and wrong in the media, because these are the only ones who looked through the system and stand against it. Since the system can’t use them, they want to demean them as much as possible.
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Orthodoxers–the System Faithful–will always try to demean us, but their faith cripples them.
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I love being a part of the system. We can be a normal person and still have some ethics and values.
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For the sake of argument and being “cheap”, how many use Linux as the only OS, how many use Linux as a VM or dual boot with Windows? Am I being cheap if I only use Linux as a tool to learn
something else or am I being cheap because I use free software with Windows? Since I am guilty of both, I guess I am “cheap” or wise to know and understand the limitations of Linux and Windows. Money or being “cheap” is not the issue, producing an OS that is comfortable for all
users to use is, and Linux has not evolved into that as of now, no matter how it is white washed.
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As I don’t know, on what criteria do you measure a “comfortable” OS, personally I strongly reject that GNU/Linux isn’t comfortable. Despite “whitewashed” whatever reason might have brought you to think this.
We sure all know, that GNU/Linux is man-made and thus has flaws, hickups and whatnot. Noone will deny that.
But we’re talking freedon here, and seen from that greater perspective this comparison does not hold much.
You can “learn something else” because you have those four freedoms: use - study - share - improve
Reading this again makes me think, I maybe just missed the main topic here, but I felt that I have to carry this out.
I don’t want to start the usual bashing “Oh, Linux is superior to Windows” and vice-versa…
In my community we encourage people to use free software. They might do this under Windows (wich is fine), or switch to GNU/Linux. Both is OK. As long as they might understand that there is just a little more about the “free” part, than just “gratis”.
The “free” in free software stands also for the freedom of choice…
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OK, but you have a total misconception of what I was posting.