this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Linux

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Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 120 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Apple's macOS has been the second most popular operating system on the Steam game distribution platform for a long time, but that has now changed.

Linux has surpassed macOS for the number two spot, according to Steam's July user hardware survey.

Steam regularly asks its users to give an anonymized look at their hardware, and the company makes the information it gathers available each month.

The Steam Deck was first released a while ago, but it only became widely available without a waiting list last October.

It worked with game publishers to see high-profile releases like Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky in recent months, and those games run pretty well on modern Macs—certainly better than similar titles on Intel-based Macs with integrated graphics chips.

It also announced a new gaming porting tool in an upcoming version of macOS that works in some ways like Proton, as seen on the Steam Deck.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Holy shit, the tl;dr bot has made it over. Thank the lord!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

i know, right? i fuckin love this thing

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's really cool they're considering a Mac version of Proton, it shows to me a more genuine attempt to improve the gaming ecosystem than I'd expect from most companies.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ever since Catalina and 32x support dropped it became nearly impossible to tell someone with a straight face you could game in a macOS environment. I used to love flaming pc and Xbox gamers with the knowledge that Halo was originally developed to be a Mac exclusive, and loved pointing out the long list of good ports for the Mac like Fable: the Lost Chapters, Spore, Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Marathon was a mac exclusive. Will the new Marathon ship on mac at all?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, dropping 32-bit made me start considering leaving the platform, despite being a happy Mac gamer for over a decade. The switch to arm finally made me move to back to pc. I expect Apple will drop their x86 compatibility layer after a few years like they did after the ppc to x86 transition.

Steam and lutris has made linux a great gaming platform for me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I liked the arm MacBooks. I used to get 17 hours off a charge with moderate use web browsing, decoding YouTube videos, and driving a 4k display.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I went through the 68k -> PPC -> OS X -> x86 transitions, but eh... That was right about when they lost me too. I rather liked OS X, but they were trying to turn it into iOS, at the same time they were making their machines non-repairable/upgradable, and losing 32 bit was just one bit more than I could stand. It was also right around the time when Proton made Linux gaming explosively viable. I could have all the Unixy tools I wanted combined with all the improvements the DEs have made while still being able to play games. I haven't looked back yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I’m running Linux full time now, but I kinda wish I had kept that MacBook for asahi as a war driver .

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I don’t know if anything will come of it. The proton tool is only to let game devs run their game on Mac hardware to evaluate performance.

They are not allowed to sell games using this tech, they need to make a native port of the game.

I think the real solution would be to let them sell their games using this tool. It worked very well for linux, and apple has plenty of money to put into something like this. A lot more than valve does.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's not just Steam Deck. It's also Proton, which managed to do what Lutris couldn't: make Magic Arena consistently work in WINE on my Linux desktop.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Proton is the reason I don't need any Windows machines anymore

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just need to suck it up and make the switch over already.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would recommend, I actually enjoy interacting with my computer now rather than just tolerating Windows

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have it dual booting, just need to make the switch over to primary.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's easy, just change the boot order so it defaults to Linux. If it's a pain to boot into Windows, you'll use it less and naturally replace your usage with Linux.

Try it for a week or two, you probably won't feel the need to go back. Make the switch today.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing today. Pretty nice, just a pain to deal with NTFS shares but maybe I won’t need them soon enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Good luck!

I haven't had any issues accessing NTFS from Linux, though running applications in Linux from NTFS is not a recipe for success. Only share data across OSes and everything should be fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Depending on what you do with it it's easier than you'd think (provided you have a decent knowledge of Linux)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I still can't figure out how to implement proton into my wine build

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Use ProtonQT-up (I think that's the name) and Lutris. Works perfectly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nah still doesn't work, lots of errors and poor performance, but that's probably because my OS is manjaro. I'm definetly going to switch to another distro, but don't know which one

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Manjaro was my first distro, and I still have a soft spot for it despite its flaws, but I tend to think Garuda now does a better job filling the Manjaro niche in just about every way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really like openSUSE Tumbleweed, it basically feels like a polished rolling release.

But what exactly are you trying to do? If you're using Steam, it just works. You can even add non-Steam games to Steam and use Proton with it. If you can't figure it out, post the issues you run into and surely someone will lend some tips.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Despite what the OP of this thread said, I use proton through Lutris. I haven't used any other tool for this yet, though I hear heroic games launcher is good too.

I'm not looking at it right now, but on Lutris you can add a new game, say it should run under wine, and then pick one of the versions of wine with proton.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice but I'm surprised it took this long when Apple is doing its best to make OSX the worst possible platform for gaming.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because people use their computers for more than just gaming, and there are a lot of Macs out there. I have Steam installed on my MacBook, and I can't remember the last time I played a game on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Eh, I use Steam occasionally on my macbook, and it works reasonably well for my intended use: taking breaks at work. I didn't choose to have a Mac, that's just standard issue for my team, but my boss is cool with me running Steam games on it from time to time provided I get my work done.

However, games just don't run well on macOS, even with official support. The CPU just isn't as powerful as my desktop, so I can't play heavy strategy games, and the GPU isn't much to write home about, so the few graphics-intensive games are out too. So I mostly play casual and story-heavy games on it, but only like once every other week or so.

99% of my gaming is on my Steam Deck or my Linux desktop, I only use macOS for a small game here and there (usually Risk or a visual novel or something).

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

there are games for mac?!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah apparently, or at least mac users with steam installed

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Depending on what games you played, mac was a decent alternative for gaming. Blizzard treated mac as a first class platform for many years, indie games using multi platform engines often targeted it, and porting studios like aspyr would bring over a few big titles here and there.

Linux was in a similar boat before proton really opened things up, but with even less support than mac from game devs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I wonder if steam will make a proton for mac.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ambrosia Software published a bunch of Mac games back in the day, but the app store crunched them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I used to play so many of their games. The Escape Velocity series was great. And I remember one called Slithereens. Oh the nostalgia!

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Bungie also treated Mac as a first class platform during late 90s and 2000s.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yup, I play a few on my work laptop (not my choice of hardware/software). A lot of stuff doesn't work, but as an occasional time-waster when I'm taking a break, it works okay.

I mostly just play quick Risk matches, but there's an okay selection of games. It basically feels like Steam on Linux back when they first launched the Linux client before Proton a thing. It kinda sucks, but there's enough selection for what I need it for.

These days I just keep my Steam Deck at my desk and play games that way instead. But before I got my Steam Deck, I played natively on macOS.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Love to see it. Really keen to see the type of new handhelds we're going to get in the future and how that'll impact market share

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And I helped!