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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Marathon was a mac exclusive. Will the new Marathon ship on mac at all?
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.
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.
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.
I’m running Linux full time now, but I kinda wish I had kept that MacBook for asahi as a war driver .
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.