Linux @ Home (Score 1)

Yes gaming will help linux penetrate the homeplace. So will GNOME, KDE, and all the great office apps that are coming out. But that's not enough. One of the big issues when dealing with the average consumer running Linux is that of drivers. Until someone can go into a store, pick up the latest piece of hardware, and have an installable linux driver included, home penetration will have problems. You can't expect the average computer user to compile a driver or a kernel. That's like asking your everyday car driver to rebuild his engine!

Unfortunately, for drivers to be available off the shelf will take some time due to some issues. I can think of two at the moment. I'm sure there are more.

Linux needs better installable driver support. The current implementation is a hack. One of the reasons for this goes back to having a monolithic kernel, but I won't go into that due to the flame war that would start :)

No definite documentation source for new kernel hacker's to go by. I've started working on Linux drivers at my job, and while O'reilley's Linux Device Drivers and AW's Linux Kernel Internal's books are useful, they lack a lot. Also, they're already somewhat outdated, and it's very hard for someone to find out what changes are between kernel revisions w/o digging through the actual kernel code. You shouldn't have to do this to write a device driver. It should be clearly documented somewhere.