good info jeffie. i dont do much a/v at all so i couldnt comment or make a "factual" statement. the only thing i do is use audacity to cut up songs for ring tones and such and nero to burn home movies.
but as far as gaming goes, it is a windows thing. no other platform can touch it for hardware/software compability. shit, only win 7 supports TRIM for ssd, not to mention the biggest baddest cards are released and ironed out for windows first. and as ive read, the new ati radeons are a pain to get working properly for linux.
Thats mainly because ATI wont open source the drivers like nvidia does. So you have to wait for ati to release a closed driver for linux (which they have to or their work station market would die since there are a lot of rendering programs fro RHEL).
