Character choices include the mascots for open source operating systems and applications of varying familiarity, with options ranging from Tux and Beastie to Gavroche, the mascot for GNU MediaGoblin.

Players race around a variety of tracks in go-karts driven by the mascots for a plethora of open source projects. SuperTuxKart takes the basic formula used by Nintendo in the Mario Kart series and applies it to open source mascots. In future articles, I plan to cover role-playing games and strategy & simulation games. I have already written about arcade-style games, board and card games, and puzzle games. This article looks at racing and flying games. Even if a particular game is not packaged for a particular distribution, it is usually easy to download the game from the project's website to install and play it. While open source games are unlikely to ever rival some of the AAA commercial games developed with massive budgets, there are plenty of open source games, in many genres, that are fun to play and can be installed from the repositories of most major Linux distributions. So, can someone who uses only free and open source software find games that are polished enough to present a solid gaming experience without compromising their open source ideals? Absolutely. Sure, the games can be played on an open source operating system, but that is not good enough for an open source purist.

That has changed somewhat in recent years thanks to Steam, GOG, and other efforts to bring commercial games to multiple operating systems, but those games often are not open source. Gaming has traditionally been one of Linux's weak points.

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