How expert do I have to be? The better way is just to have an Advanced … button that takes those who dare off on another path.
Back to topic…
There may be SOME kind of market emerging for Linux games thansk, justa touch ironically, to Sun.
We’ve recently made deals with governments to put a ton of JDS stations in various other couintries. In some cases these are public access stations. So while I mstill nto sure there is a packaged product market in some of these countries due to long standing piracy-histories and or the public acccess nature of computer resources, there MAY be a market building there for online services.
If you just have some additional options an “advanced” button is better. If you have two completely different configuration possibilities (not always necessary) you need more than an “advanced” button. Maybe expert is not a good word (valuing the user), so you could for example call it “configuration wizard” and “manual configuration”. The first one asks simple questions and covers the most likely configurations (step by step) and the latter one is more or less only a layer above a text configuration file.
[quote]Back to topic…
There may be SOME kind of market emerging for Linux games thansk, justa touch ironically, to Sun.
We’ve recently made deals with governments to put a ton of JDS
[/quote]
Slaps forehead; Doh! Of course…What happens each time hundreds of thousands of civil-servants / govt workers switch to linux? Lots and lots and lots more people tyring to play games, of course…what else do they have to occupy them all day ? ;D 
[quote]If you just have some additional options an “advanced” button is better. If you have two completely different configuration possibilities (not always necessary) you need more than an “advanced” button. Maybe expert is not a good word (valuing the user), so you could for example call it “configuration wizard” and “manual configuration”. The first one asks simple questions and covers the most likely configurations (step by step) and the latter one is more or less only a layer above a text configuration file.
[/quote]
You seem to have missed the entire point of the rant. The user in question IS an expert. And what he was running was a ‘configuration wizard’ (the alternative is to edit a bunch of even more cryptic text files). the point was that (most) so-called wizards on Linux systems are so bad that they baffle computer experts.
I must finish my Java version of Solitaire 
I’ll make millions.
The last things I wrote were not specific to the article, but generally about configuration of programs on Linux. Reading my posts again, this could easily be misunderstood. :-/
I just wanted to outline that it can often be good to offer different configuration approaches to satisfy all users, expecially for complex configurations.
If you try to please all of the people all of the time you’ll fail, plain and simple. One of the golden rules of marketing is that you have to make sure you exclude people from your market or you’ll lose focus and produce something that satisfies no-one.
Cas