I think [Wine] will be, at a minimum, incredibly useful to archeology, like DosBox has been for playing Wing Commander. Certainly it has been known t… - Ryan C. Gordon

I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later... Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort.

I happen to like the "feel" of OpenGL more, which isn't something I can explain well to those that aren't programmers, but I don't think it matters much at this point which API one chooses. More or less, you have feature parity between both APIs, both have made a handful of design mistakes, and both do a few things in slightly more pleasant ways than the other. Of course, the unforgivable thing about Direct3D is that it only works on Windows. If it was truly cross-platform, though, I wouldn't really object to using it. But since you write OpenGL almost everywhere, and Direct3D almost nowhere, it seems like a false choice to me.

Slackware was great in that it did the one thing I want my distro to do more than anything, and that's stay the hell out of my way... Gentoo basically stays the hell out of your way... and Portage goes a long way to basically do exactly what you'd have done on Slackware without having to do it manually... maybe I'm getting greedy in my old age, but I don't want to compile my packages anymore.