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.~~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.
I did my part 👌
I’m doing my part
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.
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.
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).
Yup, sorry guys, that was me.
I’m glad back a few years ago I planned my PC for Linux. AMD everything. It’s been a mostly smooth operation.
Beating Mac in gaming is like beating Glass Joe in Punch Out!!
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.
There’s only three players. It’s more like the second Piston Honda.
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.
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.
Me too, but that’s up to Valve. If they don’t want it under macOS, then they don’t.
The possible agreement aside, there might also be cartel pressure upon Valve to not do this. Apple was making their jump from x86_64 to ARM on Macs about the same time as Proton was appearing in Steam. Perhaps Proton for Linux doesn’t result in pressure, while Proton for macOS would.
In theory they could put out a paid compatibility tool in their marketplace, with Codeweavers getting a cut. Valve, I mean. If that were a problem with not hurting Codeweavers’ business. Mac users are known to be tolerant to paying for software.
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
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.
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)
this, if apple wants to be serious they have to support vulkan.
