Linux gaming is pretty good, glad to see it rise. software like Heroic launcher exists and allows to launch non steam games as well as other launchers. it’s pretty good. even pirated windows games work just fine
I am doing my part!
(arch btw :P)
show fastfetch or get out da here! 😂
I’m typing this on a M1 Pro McBook right now and let me tell you, from all of my Steam games maybe 10% are compatible with macOS/Apple Silicon. I tried Crossover and it kinda sucks.
It’s a shame really when you consider that Apple once had a better gaming scene than Windows/MS DOS, but it clearly hadn’t been a focus for Apple for a long time until maybe 2 or so years ago.
But yeah, gaming on Linux is awesome and is gonna get even better with stuff like Wine 11 eventually coming to Proton.
I tried Crossover and it kinda sucks.
WDYM? It’s Wine like Wine. With a GUI similar to PlayOnLinux and such.
I suspect Steam lacking Proton is the main reason you don’t like it. That’s easy to get used to, yes.
That might be, eh, sort of a business agreement between Valve and Codeweavers, the latter play a significant role in upstream Wine’s development after all. And Crossover is their paid product.
I don’t like it because it takes forever to set everything up and in the end you still get errors, or at least I did.
Wine kinda sucks for that exact reason, IMO, if you get it right it works really well but until then it’s a troubleshooting nightmare. Maybe Proton made me a bit too lazy.
I’m doing my part
I did my part 👌
Gaming on Mac is infuriating. I brought my MacBook air to my parents last time thinking I could use it to play left 4 dead with mom. Which used to run at 120 fps. Now it doesn’t run at all. Lol
That’s because l4d runs on x86 and new macs are arm chips.
Also important that Mac primarily supports their own proprietary graphics api, while other platforms support open standards like Opengl and Vulkan. Which makes coding games for Apple a pain few are willing to endure.
The games that WORK run incredibly on my M4 MacBook Air… the 15-20% of my Steam collection. D: ah well, that’s not what it’s for anyway.
Lol l4d ran natively until recently. Should have brought my steam deck.
Linux passing 5% is a major milestone, good to see Linux thrive. 👍 😎
Part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers
I wonder why there needs to be special correction for China, but I’m guessing it’s about some sort of bots probably farm bots.
If anyone knows more please share your knowledge.A bit of a guess, but it might be related to software cafés. They are a lot more common in the east.
Since multiple people can log into the same computer, it might over count them. They are also likely exclusively windows machines.
~~I think, like the rest of the world, we try to go away from US software. Windows is the big one, and China would like to go open source.
They do that because it’s the strongest weapon against capitalism in the US. That country is nothing if they cant monetize on everything.~~
EDIT: I’m an idiot. Didnt read the article, but I did now. Just pass my stupid comment.
Maybe you should read the article, because the increase in Linux users correlates with a reduction in Chinese users.
I mean yeah? As a PC gamer what are you supposed to use? Fucking… Windows?
I know some people still manage to tolerate paying Microsoft for an operating system that serves popup ads, popunder ads, inline ads, bundles spyware, bundles adware, bundles malware, and literally spies on you. They either manage to filter all that out or tolerate having to spend time turning it off or mitigating it every two weeks/months when an update introduces more of it.
They angrily cope. They say things like “what is so hard about just clicking Close / Ignore on a few buttons!?” when this is pointed out. But they grow fewer and fewer.
Macs are mostly valid but expensive. If work doesn’t pay for one, or you have another big hobby that makes Mac a necessity, buying one for gaming is a bit silly.
Apple actually have shown that they can make cheap computers like Macbook Neo, but I doubt they want to make computers that allow freedom of Linux, hell even Windows. Gaming is also non-existent on Macbooks, because for some they want to use their own graphics API (Metal), although some kind of a translation layer (MoltenVK) exists, but I have no idea how good it is.
fyi: you can install linux on a mac
paying Microsoft for an operating system
To be fair, I haven’t paid Microsoft for my OS…ever. And it’s not even piracy.
I got a licence for free through my university when I was in uni. And Microsoft seemed happy to let me keep using it and even upgrading it. I started on Windows 8, upgraded for free to Windows 10. If my PC didn’t have a processor that seemingly arbitrarily they decided can’t run Windows 11, I could be on that today.
you did pay with your usage data.
Same. Got XP and Vista from the university, license for Vista allowed to update to 7, 10 (never used 8)… Now I use LTSC + massgrave activation, but technically I have a 10 license.
I’m in there!
I have a Legion Go and I wiped Windows 11 off the damned thing so fast and installed Bazzite.
You have to wonder what these numbers will look like in about 6 months after the Neo’s well received release.
I feel like I’m part of the minority when I say I’m highly excited for things like M5, APUs, smaller power efficient machines that barely draw power while doing boring work tasks yet can handle proper gaming loads (waiting for the last part still).
As soon as one of these checks all my boxes I’m selling my massive PC for it.
Yep, I’d really like to stick to SoCs in the future as well. I’m holding off on hardware purchases until 2027 when AMD’s RDNA 5 will be available. Apple Silicon is amazing, but I’d like a less expensive alternative that has broader Linux distro support. RDNA 5 will bring true RTX cores, which is critical for my Blender rendering workloads, and is the main reason why I couldn’t justify AMD GPUs in the past for anything other than a dedicated gaming machine (e.g., Steam Deck).
Good luck getting any new PC in 2027 for a decent price LMAO
Oh, don’t worry. The bubble is going to pop <checks watch> aaaaany minute now.
It’s not popping until Trump is out of office and that’s not until at least 2028.
Though he does provide a lot of fuel for it, the bubble exists independently of the grifter-in-chief. Also, blot clots are a thing.
Oh I’m right there with you. My machines are a Legion Go, an M2 Mac mini and a MacBook Pro m1. What CPUs are starting to do with such a minute amount of power is amazing.
Right? Now just let me push 1440p x2 and play games on high/ultra from the size of half a shoebox please.
We should be able to download 1440p storage sized games instead of giant 100gb+ honkers FFS.
I’m glad back a few years ago I planned my PC for Linux. AMD everything. It’s been a mostly smooth operation.
Yup, sorry guys, that was me.
Holy shit, you’re the John Linux?
That very same, yup. You might know my song:
“Imagine all the people /
Living life in shells.”
Beating Mac in gaming is like beating Glass Joe in Punch Out!!
I have every OS and tons of computers. I used my m4 MacBook Air when I went to the hospital because the battery life is eternal and the speakers are uncomfortably good for something so small. I did play some games on it, and they ran incredibly for such a crazy small machine.
Alas… the library that worked… SO SMALL! So many games are Windows/Linux only. I’d love to see that change, but luckily for me, that’s the only time I ever cared to try games on my MacBook.
I’ve owned a lot of macs over the last 30 years, but I don’t think Ive tried more than once to game on them.
That’s fair haha. I bought a Mac in the late 2000’s specifically to play games! At the time, I wanted a thin laptop with a good screen, good battery life, super light, and a high end video card and processor. I was constantly playing games at friends’ houses and going to LAN parties, and by no means did I want a desktop to lug around with my giant CRT monitor and keyboard and all that shit.
All of the PC laptops at the time were HUUUUGE! I sold computers at the time, and I hated every design of every windows computer. I looked at the 15” MacBook Pro, with its … okay amount of RAM, excellent dedicated video card, better processor than any PC laptop, and holy shit over two thousand US dollars price tag and… just went for it. Installed windows of course, and it played everything incredibly and was everything I wanted. A couple years later, it had an unfortunate accident and I had to get it written off under warranty, and paid a couple hundred dollars for a 2011 model. Did the same thing, installed Windows, and it played… everything amazingly. I love it. I still have it! I still use it! It has 16GB RAM and a SSD where the optical drive used to live now, but shit… still does standard tasks and video and whatnot totally fine!
Now, got a crazy deal on a MacBook Air last year. It COULD play games, but not much runs on MacOS. That’s okay though, it’s not what I got it for (NOTHING handles a photo library my size better than iPhoto, nothing even comes close.) love the thing, but Mac hardware playing games is over with the M series as far as I can tell.
Ah, but no-one would question Mac support when you’re developing new software. If you can support Mac, which is certified UNIX, then the jump to supporting Linux isn’t all that much extra, and we can prove there’s a growing install base.
Started the ball rolling, and it just keeps going faster.
Games rely on more than just the OS API and even variation between Linux flavours or installed libraries on the same flavours can make compatibility difficult. My success rate at running games with a Linux native version is maybe 50% before I fall back to proton and the windows version. The consistency helps, though kudos to the developers who put in the effort to get their games working on Linux in general rather than just their particular systems.
The gpu library is a big one. There’s OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan (which is the successor to OpenGL) that I know of. Linux and windows support all three, in some form or manner, but afaik mac only supports OpenGL, which really holds back game development, especially with DX being the most popularly targeted one.
Though my info might be a bit dated because I dgaf about macs generally, just wanted to point out that the shared roots between mac and Linux don’t necessarily mean targeting one would make targeting the other easier in a meaningful way.
Maybe one day they’ll sell a dongle to play games (which is really just a live boot linux install).
Oh definitely. Linux should definitely be targeted before macs because people who are on it I’m sure play more games. But again not a high bar as a lot of games never get Mac versions either.
A decade ago things were looking really positive for the future of Mac gaming. It felt like more and more games were coming out supporting it. I’m not sure if their transition away from Intel has hindered it, or if it’s something else, but it definitely seems to have stalled.
Plus, the move to Apple Silicon has killed the back-up option of Bootcamp. Or I assume it has, I’ve not been a Mac user since before the transition, when my ageing MBP died and I just found I didn’t need any laptop to replace it.
It’s simple, Apple has never cared about gaming except for that 1 year you are talking about. They’ve done fuck all to get developers to target mac and it shows.
I’m talking about the whole period of like 2010 to about 2018.
I definitely don’t remember any sort of golden era of mac gaming like that. I remember them announcing some games along with their Metal API’s and that was about the end of that .
I wouldn’t have described it as a golden era. More like a constant, steady, quiet sense of improvement.
I had a friend who gamed on a Mac for a while during that period, most games did work for her.
I do think the M series chips set it back a bit because most games aren’t targeting ARM, so you have to use Rosetta to emulate reducing performance
And now Rosetta is getting deprecated in the next release too!
There are some pretty good emulation layers for the M chips. If Apple set up a certification program like Steam Deck has, they’d be in pretty good shape.
Except I’m sure they’d charge out the ass and they don’t seem to put any effort into gaming 🤷
There’s only three players. It’s more like the second Piston Honda.
Apple doesn’t support Vulcan (or the support is outdated, idk exactly), and expects devs to use Metal instead. Which they don’t. So outside of small indie games, people gaming on Mac likely boot Windows anyway, or at least that’s how it was ten years ago — the situation might’ve changed with the M* processors, in that I’m not sure Windows runs on them.
this, if apple wants to be serious they have to support vulkan.
No, there’s no way to easily install Windows on Apple Silicon like back in the days of Bootcamp on Intel. If there’s no native macOS version of a game, you have to use translation layers like you would on Linux - either Wine or Apple’s own Game Porting Toolkit.
There’s also no support for 32-bit apps any more, so many older games with native macOS releases don’t work anymore either.
That said, when I looked through my Steam & GOG libraries on Mac I was surprised at how many games do apparently run natively. Far more than I expected. But it’s just a curiosity really - if I want to play a game I’ll use my PC.
how many games do apparently run natively
From what I understand, indie devs mostly just check a box in their engine’s build script to compile the game for MacOS. It’s rather the big boys who always have trouble porting their games anywhere due to bespoke engines, anticheat or whatnot. And also sim racing devs for some reason, those never support anything but Windows — even though Feral has ported F1 games to Mac and they worked fine.
Very few things in game dev are as simple as checking a box in the engine, unfortunately.
To distribute a macOS game on Steam I believe the app needs to be signed and notarised, which requires several extra steps and a (paid) Apple Developer account. It’s one reason why many devs simply don’t bother supporting the platform.
Sure, but the developer account costs about two and a half Doordash pizzas (which every USian orders every day for some unfathomable reason, judging by the incessant complaining on Reddit), and to my understanding signing can be automated.
I recently got my custom game engine running on an M4 Macbook, and it was definitely a pain. Using MoltenVK to translate the API works, but there’s a bunch of device features that are missing still I had to work around.
Off the top of my head it’s missing drawIndirectCount, linePolygonMode, and the ability to set line thickness above 1 px, which are Vulkan 1.2 features. I also had to do some tweaking since several device limits are lower (can only reference ~500 textures at once instead of 64k like most systems)
