Games
Well, we have sound and 3D. Who can think of an obvious use of sound and 3D? That's right, games! I'm going to cover two types of game here - native Linux titles, and Windows-only games, in this case the Steam platform in order to run Half-Life and mods.An example: take your shiny Unreal Tournament 2004 DVD, pop it in the drive, mount it, and run the installer with "sh /your/dvd/mountpoint/linux-installer.sh". When the installer is finished, run "ut2004" to play the game:
Done. Those of you with a lower-spec system and an nVidia graphics card may notice that play is better than under Windows - level load times are certainly slashed, at the very least.
ATI owners don't fare so well. On my system (Pentium 4 2.26Ghz, 512Mb Corsair XMS3000, Albatron PX845PE Pro II board):
No, the results aren't faked. After all of the messing around, ATI's driver performance is abominable (and it is well known to be bad, I'm not the only one showing figures this pathetic). It's not unique to UT2004, it's generally. If you plan on gaming with a Linux system, I strongly recommend using an nVidia card.
Well after than unpleasantness, how about more games?