Hi !

1. You need an older video card with an NVIDIA graphics chipset or Intel graphics. Not all games for GNU/Linux will work although many of the older titles will. The 9500GT is a good choice for graphics.

http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/ - 25% of the profits from sales go to Trisquel. Everything here is free software and will work with Trisquel 99% works out of the box (and 100% with a little effort, the rest of stuff will work tomorrow out of the box, such hardware is noted on the product pages)

2. You shouldn't have any problems mining Bitcoins although CPU mining isn't a realistic option any more. Using a graphics card is not an option although this won't be an option for anybody very shortly either anyway. ASIC hardware is the future (actually it is here already) of bitcoin mining.

3. There is Cinelerra for video editing although chances are you probably aren't actually a profesional and what you want is something comparable to whats available for MS Windows / Apple. For that I'd point you to OpenShot. There are others although this one is easy enough to use and works really well. It may be a bit weak on the features compared to other consumer video editing applications. There are other video editing applications for GNU/Linux that are free which may have a bigger feature set. They may or may not work as well.

Cinelerra is what your asking about although it is designed for large development houses looking to produce hollywood length films. If you are a 'professional' and have a small development house it's not for you. It has a steep learning curve. It is extremely powerful though and useful for the larger studios. It supports things like distributed encoding so you can have hundreds or thousands of systems working together to produce your video. You would also probably have to use a distribution which includes non-free software simply because the software itself is so complex and tailored for Redhat Enterprise GNU/Linux or maybe it is SuSE (I believe they distribute RPMs and I don't think there are any DEBs for Debian/Ubuntu). You could probably get it working and I believe it is free software. At least the core of it and everything you would need to make it work (but certain codecs, etc might not be, but you could probably use ones that are free).

1) 0 A.D. and Xonotic are high quallity
2) Honestly, this would suck with currently avaliable free software only.
3) Blender can do wonders.
4) There are no limits: As long as you have gcc you can do anything. As a programmer you can check out FSF high priority project list ( http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ ), otherwise reporting bugs upstream and spreading the word about free software is good idea as well.

Regarding games, there aren't a huge amount, but some great ones are Xonotic, MegaGlest, OpenArena, SuperTuxKart, Warzone 2100, Torus Trooper, Tremulous, Minetest, Red Eclipse, and Ryzom.

Some great non-3D games are many of the games by Kenta Cho (my favorites are Torus Trooper and Tumiki Fighters), Teeworlds, X-Moto, Secret Maryo Chronicles, Ri-li, Pingus, NetHack, LBreakout2, LTris, Liquid War, Scavenger, OpenClonk, Rocks'n'Diamonds, FreeCiv, and Endgame: Singularity.

There are many, many more, but these are ones that I've personally played and that are high-quality, though most have graphics that are "outdated" (the most modern of these in terms of graphics and sound are Xonotic, Red Eclipse, and OpenClonk, I think).

Jump in and try to do what ever you want to do. Welcome to freedom!

Ditto on the heart-warming, Armworm. I finally joined the forum, but have been reading a while... lurking? :) I'm not a gamer, but wanted to say hello, antarta. It's a pleasure to read words of wisdom on a subject near and dear to my heart... Freedom!

Thanks everybody for welcoming me warmly. I really appreciate it. I can assure you that it is my goal to contribute to the community of trisquel as much as I can. Free software must be adopted by everyone. It's the future. It's good for everyone.

Hello antarta, as far free software games go, there is Nexuiz (it's somewhat of a UT clone). I like to play it from time to time, if you want to join me, you should be able to see my personal email, feel free to use it.

Also there is this 2D MMORPG called Mana, I just recently started playing it and it looks interesting too.

Edit: all those things are in the repository of course