and there was much rejoicing!
I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS
I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS
Apple’s GPU cores suck. As much as you can genuinely praise their CPU work (which you can somewhat easily upscale with more cores and more cache), even the most high-end ARM Mac has a GPU that’s just an iPhone GPU with more cores but without any actual high-end features such as raytracing (more of the same limited cores can’t just magically become a raytracing engine). Even Steam Deck’s GPU is capable of raytracing because it’s not an upscaled phone GPU but a downscaled high-end GPU.
Is this finally the year of Linux “Desktop”…?
The year of Linux handheld console
I’m as happy as you all, but having a teenager that starts to mod games, I realize the whole modding ecosystem of many popular games is Windows only.
Many peoples say you should play on pc because of modding. I would say from a Linux perspective, having the modding community switching to Linux is the next big step.
What kinds of things are you having a hard time modding in Linux? I generally stay away from AAA games and especially AAA games that don’t have mod support. There’s gimp. There’s blender. There’s audacity. There’s an abundance of good text editors. Almost every file explorer is easier to use and more powerful than the one in Windows. Java development kit kind of sucks in Linux with that export path variable nonsense that never ever works correctly but other than that, I don’t think I could do half the modding in Windows that I do in Linux.
When the game has no official modding support you need base modifications probably already compiled by someone else with who knows really what exact modification.
An example is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Base, unmodded game is actually Platinum on Wine’s AppDB. But when you mod (by running injecting scripts via a modified dinput8.dll file) the game gets very unstable no matter what mod unlike on Windows.
So someone just needs to be interested enough in playing it to jump into a Wine staging dev and do the leg work to fix what breaks.
That’s exactly how Wine has continued to expand what it can do for over 30 years…
You mean mod managers? A lot of those actually still work under WINE and you can even run them in a game’s prefix using Winetricks and Protontricks (which is how a lot of us do it)
It performs exactly as expected, all mod managers really do is automate putting files where they need to go.
This might be true of some things, but I jumpstarted a software engineering career modding Minecraft and running Minecraft servers on Linux
More like “…thanks to years of neglect by Apple.”
Years? More like decades at this point. Apple hasn’t really given a shit about gaming since the late 90s.
Imagine if MS let them have Halo. The world would be so different. Gamers would have flocked to macs instead of Xbox.
Imagine if MS let them have Halo. The world would be so different. Gamers would have flocked to macs instead of Xbox.
I don’t think the Halo brand would be nearly as widely known as it is now.
🥳🥳🥳
The thing that suprises me in the headline: You can actually run steam and games on macOS?
Yeah. There was a whale event in TF2 back when it was ported where you got Apple earbuds ingame if you played the Mac port during a certain timeframe.
Since maybe 2010? That’s when I first played portal and it was on a Mac.
MacOS still has horrible support for wine. Linux’s implementation of proton has become so good, that r/wine_gaming essentially has become nothing but MacOS helpdesk tickets now!
The thing that suprises me in the headline: You can actually run steam and games on macOS?
Steam on my Mac is merely an updater for Krita.
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No
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You will be unable to read bullet #1 without using Apple’s undocumented, unversioned mystery Apple Silicon translator that “Just works” *
* it does not, in fact, “just work”
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Well, you COULD, but very few companies port now due to Apple refusing to update their OpenGL drivers in favor of Metal. Nowadays it’s a bit better, with MoltenVK providing Vulkan support, but you’re still mostly limited to Apple Arcade games and emulators for your gaming needs
And yet some developers decide to pour over resources to make a MacOS native port over a Linux port
I use both and I can tell you that is rare. Mac gaming is trash.
We don’t bother with Linux ports anymore, instead they just added directX and win32 application support to Linux so it can just run the native Windows application.
People who buy Macs probably have money and are willing to spend it.
…it their money aren’t already gone for a 999$ monitor stand.
SteamDeck buyers on the other side…
@emergencyfood @UnaSolaEstrellaLibre I would spend money on a great Linux laptop that could game at 1440p max settings but I have not found the one, yet. Any recs?
A quick search suggests System76 might do the trick.
I’ve had a terrible time with them. The laptops all have the same issue with the hinges.
In that case consider Lenovo Legion series. Not made specific for Linux, but I’ve had good results with them.
The framework laptops are pretty good from what I hear. If I get to the point I need a laptop, I’ll look closer at those.
A mac port gets you mac users.
A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
A mac port gets you mac users.
A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
Apple’s new porting helper is nothing but Wine + D3D to Metal wrapper + Rosetta x86 emulation.
Well, they probably use Macs.
Quick search shows only like 30 of developers as a whole use Mac’s and I’m sure share is lower there because I know plenty of devs using macbooks that are running Linux or Windows. If we are talking game developers as a whole then that percentage of osx devs is far far smaller than the general usage. Windows using devs still dominate as a whole, Linux is not far behind, MacOS is a very vocal yet, smaller in reality group.
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Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is “community driven”. Fuck’em, we will manage without them like we always have.
SteamOS isn’t a community project. It’s a corporate project. It’s just that Valve themselves aren’t even pushing for native SteamOS games. There was an interview once with one of the SteamOS guys who merely said in passing during an interview that native games are better but that remark was lost in pretty much all reporting. Even developers of games based on Unity don’t care to export Linux builds because Windows builds work just fine (until they don’t because a Proton update breaks something).
Just in time to exit Windows due to their “telemetry” programs.
Just in time to exit Windows due to their “telemetry” programs.
I fear I have bad news for you about commercial games even on Linux…
Well I guess I should just go to Windows to get it 24/7, I got nothing to hide anyway.
I’m so happy that I never have to use that dog shit OS ever again, or any of their software for that matter.
I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don’t care anymore. I’m more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn’t be happier.
I too was dual booting for a while but the last straw was when a windows update erased GRUB a second time. I’ve been on Linux exclusively for 4 years now and I haven’t looked back.
Sadly corporate institutions still require windows
Yeah, definitely the downfall that spans way back to IBM. Thankfully my place gives that choice to folks (Apple and Microsoft both being proprietary but hey one is Unix based).
Every time I have to use a Windows VM for something, I become more and more grateful that I don’t have to use their crap anymore. What got me recently was finding out that you are forced to create an account and be online to even install the latest version!
Technically there are still workarounds like disconnecting from the network or editing the installation sources, but it’s still anti-user and worse than in older versions. Win will continue to get worse over time. Look at a freshly installed, default W11 Home consumer desktop for example. What most people probably use. Just open the start menu. It looks like the OS needs an exorcism first, before you can use it. But maybe many people have already become used to things being this bad
Disconnecting the internet no longer works, you’ll need to open a shell and put in a cryptic command to disable the check or use an email address which got banned
I love my Steam Deck and Linux works surprisingly well with gaming nowadays…
But let’s be fair here, given the abysmally bad number of games available for macOS, the fact that it surpassed the Mac install base isn’t really surprising or big.
Mac OS does have 15x the number of users (in the US at least, closer to 6x the users outside the US), so this is still an accomplishment in my opinion.
But that’s my point, really. The number of total Mac users isn’t that relevant because, given that platform’s constraints and goals, the share of users downloading a game store is significantly lower.
Now with Linux (in the desktop/home use) you have tech inclined people, and every single Steam Deck ever sold, which means the percentage of users installing Steam is certainly higher. This metric of slightly surpassing Mac still paints a picture of very slow adoption of Linux.
I used to work in the video industry so I know dozens and dozens of Mac users and I’d say under 10 of them play games. And only one of them plays games on their computer…by dual booting to windows.
I bought a mac book pro once because I was getting into graphic design and bought into the hype that mac was the way to go even after being a windows user for 10 years at the time.
But…I still had to integrate with windows networks for administration work, had to use windows only applications for work, use windows for the bulk of my games…
Obviously I ended up dual booting with windows for a while, but in the end I just stopped using the mac os.
Gaming is the only reason I still bother to install windows on desktop PCs.
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This is awesome. As someone that games on all 3 platforms, I’m happy to see that Linux usage has gone up so rapidly, even if it is only because of the steamdeck. It’s a great way to introduce people to the wonders of Linux! And yes I do game on my MacBook. The sims lol, it is actually nice to have SOMETHING to play when I feel like not working. And a surprising # of my favorite games work on Mac wonderfully like cities skylines and the 2 point games and many more. I’m always happy when any platform other than windows can play games as collectively these smaller platforms need to dethrone windows, in my opinion.
Two decades ago, we at KDE always said that 5% was the magic number. If we got to 5% market share on the Linux desktop, then commercial games, applications, etc. would directly target it rather than ignore it. The steamdeck is wonderful, and if you include it, Linux is at about 3% right now. But it actually caused a huge acceleration in game adoption. So gaming is now ahead of that projection. Applications (i.e. Photoshop) probably still need 5%. Although we made that projection two decades ago, so it may no longer be valid due to cloud apps.
(I’m no longer involved with KDE, but was for a decade. It was an awesome decade.)
Thanks for all your work on KDE! My favorite DE, hands down. O7
I started using Linux / GNU/Linux based operating systems for more than a day or so at a time when I got Puppy Linux on my USB drive back in 2016 or so. Ever since then I put Fatdog64 and other Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint on my laptop.
Everybody knows that the one true game on Mac is Apple Chess. That’s why hardly anyone makes ARM Mac games: the competition is just too stiff.
I switched to Windows for gaming this year. With advances in Wine/Proton it was super easy; there’s nothing I play that isn’t perfectly convertible to Linux anymore.
Even using an Nvidia card in my desktop seems fine.
The only thing holding me back is VR, I have a Quest 2 and the PC drivers are only for Windows.
It was supereasy! Barely an inconvenience!
Oh really?
You switched to Windows?
They probably meant “Switched from windows” or “switched to windows version of the games they play”.
You switched to Windows?
Maybe installing Windows versions of games instead of native Linux versions?
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that’s my go to one!
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that’s my go to one!
May I introduce you to crap like Alien Isolation where the porting companies went all-in on Nvidia-exclusive features and the version with higher compatibility is indeed the Windows release.
The topic of market share, and ports and lack of them, are nuanced but I highly doubt Linux won’t overtake macOS even more each year unless Apple wakes up. Valve and Linux community are a force to be reckon with. There are other individuals in the scene as well, who are chipping away at improving the gaming ecosystem, such as System76, Redhat and Canonical.
