There are lots of people in the same boat, and hence lots of solutions: primarily dual-boot machines and multiple machines. You can't be a PC gamer for very long without accumulating enough obsolete parts to build at least one extra computer. Dig out that old mobo, video card and 'too small' HD, buy a cheap case and a KVM. You're set.
Or, if you just wanna play, download Knoppix and be a Linux user tonight!
FWIW, little kids generally don't have any problems using a mouse. In fact they seem to pick it up almost immediately - possibly given that they have no preconceived expectations, as opposed to old folks who are somewhat prone to expect it to be difficult and new-fangled, which kind of sets them up for failure.
For the old folks, I think the idea of a touchscreen-driven web browsing device has legs, and Linux would be the perfect base for something like that (as long as nobody ever saw it, a la TiVo). If you made it relatively pleasant to look at and could stand it up on an end table, you could sell it as an 'ever-changing picture frame' as well - the digital camera-toting generation down could send pictures to it, and it would display them as a screensaver.
One fairly important thing missing is how to handle hover/mouseover type links, given that there is no touchscreen equivalent for that - of course there are few other elements that would need to be set up right for touchscreen.
Now if only there was a relatively mature, well-supported, extensible open-source browser out there somewhere.
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Or, if you just wanna play, download Knoppix and be a Linux user tonight!
FWIW, little kids generally don't have any problems using a mouse. In fact they seem to pick it up almost immediately - possibly given that they have no preconceived expectations, as opposed to old folks who are somewhat prone to expect it to be difficult and new-fangled, which kind of sets them up for failure.
For the old folks, I think the idea of a touchscreen-driven web browsing device has legs, and Linux would be the perfect base for something like that (as long as nobody ever saw it, a la TiVo). If you made it relatively pleasant to look at and could stand it up on an end table, you could sell it as an 'ever-changing picture frame' as well - the digital camera-toting generation down could send pictures to it, and it would display them as a screensaver.
One fairly important thing missing is how to handle hover/mouseover type links, given that there is no touchscreen equivalent for that - of course there are few other elements that would need to be set up right for touchscreen.
Now if only there was a relatively mature, well-supported, extensible open-source browser out there somewhere.
Oh. Right. So there is.