It's amazing that it works at all, but yeah the setup sounds like a total pain.

I've mostly just stuck with gaming on the Switch because it starts up fast, doesn't update excessively, and mostly just gets out of the way to let me play the game I want to play. This is only in the context of first party titles though, I can't speak as well to third party titles.

I do appreciate the article though - was thinking about repurposing a M1 MacBook for games for kids and this tells me it is a better idea to sell it and get a different computer instead, maybe a second hand workstation for cheap.

And despite all these flaws, the game will somehow get a 5 star “Runs great” rating.

I run most things on linux, no game is important enough for me to switch back to windows or give them another dime

Ironically, CrossOver itself is $500

Linux gaming is actually significantly better than Mac gaming at the moment, in large part due to Valve. The GPU support is way better / faster and there’s less emulation overhead involved.

Linux gaming is absolutely incredible right now. After an essay of several months, however, I recently switched my gaming rig back to Windows 10 for three reasons alone: the multiplayer game I mainly play with my buds is one of the very, very few that won’t work on Linux due to anti-cheat shenanigans, Steam Big Screen has a persistent bug with Nvidia cards even as of 560.x, and I could never quite get Sunshine + Moonlight streaming (essential for playing games with the kids around the house) working without micro-stutters. I fully expect 2 of those to be solved within the next few months (doubtless someone more proficient with Linux could solve them in an afternoon).

Very excited for SteamOS general availability for desktops. Owning a Steam Deck has made me really appreciate an immutable OS - especially for a gaming rig, which I don’t want to spend time maintaining.

Edit: As an aside, I’ll just add that for anyone interested in streaming, Steam Remote Play has quietly gone from being an also-ran, to genuinely excellent in the last couple of years. It requires - in my case at least - a lot less tinkering than S+M and produces an extremely low-latency, high quality feed.

Proton (custom WINE by valve) is so good now thanks to Vulkan, you generally only lose about 5% performance compared to Windows, with a 10% difference in rare cases.

It's very easy to be a hardcore gamer on Linux now, outside of a handful of online games that gave yet to flip the switch to let their anti-cheat run on Linux.

Thatseems fairly subjective . Specs similar to a MBP? Because mine has a retina, 120 Hz display with HDR with max brightness of 1200 nits.

That MBP display utterly crushes my other standalone monitors- a 4K@60 w/ HDR@300-nits. Or a 1080p @90 Hz (SDR).

but of course. can't wire my linux gaming pc up to my laptop's display without some surgery.

Yeah, unfortunately Apple have backed themselves into a corner there with their ~220ppi Retina display standard. Nobody makes monitor-sized panels that dense which also support high refresh rates, they're all limited to 60hz. The Apple monitors still don't support VRR either, even though the software support has been in place on macOS for a while it only works with third party monitors.

Yup.

I use a Mac to get work done. It would be nice to use it for a bunch of games, but I really couldn't be arsed. If I really wanted to game, I'd set up a PC gaming box.

The algorithm won't accept nuanced takes. Must fish for engagement.

Gotta love the irrational exuberance of Mac users.

To be fair, one couldn't have even said that much about Linux a decade ago even though Linux ran on the same hardware as Windows. Now we can say that we can do Windows gaming on Linux and it is amazing. It is possible to both play a huge swath of Steam games under Linux, with comparable performance to Windows, and to go the "a lot of effort" route with non-Steam games under Wine (again, with comparable performance to Windows). That's before considering native Linux games.

Whisky is now unsupported.

Note also that Whisky is no longer maintained, author suggests using CrossOver.

https://docs.getwhisky.app/maintenance-notice

I see the repo has fairly recent updates, but the website says the project is no longer actively maintained.

https://docs.getwhisky.app/maintenance-notice

I wonder how this compares to porting kit and wineskin. That's what I've been using for Windows gaming on Mac and it's been running well for me on my m3 air- this is the first time I've ever heard of crossover.

Linux works because it runs the most stable Linux ABI is available— Win32.

Mac users are generally running on aarch64 rather than x86, so you have the binary compatibility barrier. Plus no 32bit support.

Steam works, but most games can't be bothered to provide macOS builds, and some that do are 32 bit and thus cannot be run (macOS only supports 64 bit executables nowadays).

Did Blizzard ever give a reason for not supporting Macs? They used to be really good about supporting them (I played a lot of WoW on one for years with zero issue). Guessing the extra effort required to support ARM didn't make financial sense?

Sadly Asahi doesn't support M3/ME silicon yet, so the Mac in the article couldn't take advantage of Asahi.

Or Windows gaming on Linux.

There’s a bunch that are available, Slay the Spire runs on Mac without any work, install straight from Steam.

I use CrossOver to play lighter-spec games on my Mac, like Animal Well, Loco Motive, Ori, UFO 50, and The Outer Wilds. I also have a gaming PC but I pretty much only use it for more demanding or super latency-sensitive games like Overwatch and Elden Ring. I’m not into most of the really high-spec AAA titles so I have not idea how well those would run.

It's less than I'd like to play at, but wasn't the point that it is great for something running on laptop hardware with integrated graphics? The implication is it would have been similar on native windows on comparable hardware.

...and 6700XT is not even high end or new.

This is probably true though as a non-gamer and recent mac convert I have basically zero complaints. Windows these days is full of too much crap that sucks away attention and makes it hard to use.

Average windows experience:

Welcome to BING (tm) with your MSN chumbucket spam links! Here's a desktop notification for a "sweepstakes"; no, you didn't get adware, just MS Windows! Enjoy this full-screen pop-up telling you to "prepare for windows 11" that completely disrupts your workflow when you're in the zone! Your computer is running slowly? Oh yeah, that's windows defender sucking up half your CPU, because not scanning every file would be a Security Risk (TM)! Want to turn that off? No worries, but you can't do that on the home edition because we don't give you group policy editor! If you do it anyway, we will re-enable this "feature" with every update and change the precise incantation of powershell miscellany, regedits, and menus that haven't been updated since the nineties you need to turn it off again!

We hope you enjoy your Windows (TM) 11 (TM) experience!

It's like fisher price, a casino mogul, and a schizo got together to cook up the latest batch of whatever slop microsquash is trying to pass off as a legit OS. Which is a shame, because the technical fundamentals are actually pretty sound. Some of this doesn't apply if you're using a corporate-managed machine, because companies don't want to put up with that nonsense, but a chunk of these annoyances still does.

It's weird to say but I enjoy using a computer to get stuff done substantially more after no longer using windows. While I still like linux, a bunch of software I need doesn't really work, and I don't have time to dick around with wine when I'm trying to do a job, so I'm glad there's a reasonably non-garbage option.

Windows will probably be the default corporate os for the forseeable future, but if the only people who actually have reasons to use it are "gamers", that should be a wake-up call for the ms product guys.

Steam, on Linux and Steam on Windows are very similar experiences. Is it much worse on the Mac?

counterpoint as a dev who works with k8s and wants a linux env:. I was told to get a mac when I joined and I wish I hadnt. WSL and vscode remote ssh make windows better for linux dev. the alternative is getting a parallels license. I mainly use vscode to remote to linux machines now and ignore my mac and wish it didn't exist. also as a longtime windows user i think the windows desktop is just better. window management, multimonitor, hell even launching apps is slow as shit on my mac m1 compared to my windows pc.

Releasing a Linux build is a waste of time given how quickly the library situation changes in distros. Better to just release a Windows version tested on Proton.