https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1kpggmu/the_stat...
What I don't get is why Valve isn't backing such efforts financially. There are millions of wealthy mac owners out there with pretty capable hardware. That should translate into quite a bit of steam purchases.
I just got a shiny m4 max laptop. I run Steam on a much less capable crappy old Samsung laptop (via manjaro). Would I run that on my mac if I could? Yes. Would I be tempted to spend a bit of cash on some fun games. Probably. Am I doing that currently? No, because that crappy old Samsung is too old and most games don't run on it. And I'm not in a mood to buy a dedicated gaming machine. I might at some point but just not a priority. But I don't mind dropping a few euros on a game to entertain myself once in a while.
If Valve were getting high numbers of people installing the macOS Steam client, and you can bet they do already have that telemetry, then they would take the platform more seriously. But most macOS users aren’t interesting in gaming on their Mac.
And with Apple's hostility towards gamers with moves like refusal to support OpenGL or Vulkan (adding extra Metal support work to their developers) and refusal to keep stable APIs for a long time for game developers, it makes sense for them to rather focus on a crowd that is easier to support.
When it comes to gaming, Apple is its own enemy since forever and has been similarly failing to gain serious traction even on iOS (considering how powerful the iOS hardware is). iPads could be Steam Decks of their time and Apple just never cared enough.
It's kind of hilarious and sad... but it works darn well and it's less work than porting to Metal and 64-bit macOS.
My point was that volunteers got quite far getting steam and many games running on macs with decent framerates. The main person driving this recently moved on from working on that. Likewise, Asahi linux is getting quite capable at running steam and lots of games. That too is being driven by a handful of people.
Supporting stuff like that doesn't sound like it should break the bank for Steam. Basically sponsor a few people; maybe hire a few more to support them. It's basically all working at this point, it just needs a bit of love and attention. This wouldn't take years of additional development. And once steam runs properly on macs with thousands of games running smoothly, a lot more people might be using steam on their macs.
Yes, they'd be picking a fight with Apple. But as Epyc (Unreal engine) is showing, those fights can be won if you have deep pockets. And Apple is under a lot of pressure to moderate their anti competitive behavior. Perfect timing for Valve to make some money of all this with a minimum of investment.
Apple decided the benefits of moving to ARM outweighed the loss of gamers.
Gaming on Mac died when they killed 32bit support and didn’t support Vulkan. Apple has pretty consistently shown almost no effort in making gaming on Mac work so everyone else has just ignored it.
Why the down-vote? Do I need to flood HN with links? It actually had ads. Go ahead and search for it (or ask me), there were ads in more than one places. It even had ads in its motd (and gnome notifications, and somewhere else I forgot)... I do not care if it is your favorite Linux distribution, it ACTUALLY had ads (and might still do) in more than one places.
So "not getting cluttered with ads" is not so certain. Only if they got rid of all ads, but the future is still not certain with regarding to it, as they have done it before without blinking an eye.
See some links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44079458 for Amazon ads.
Also https://askubuntu.com/questions/1083504/how-to-disable-the-a... for bit.ly links in motd.
If you need more, I am willing to provide.
https://www.thefastcode.com/en-idr/article/how-to-disable-th... (How To Disable the Amazon Search Ads in Ubuntu's Unity Dash)
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10asnf/ubuntu_will_n...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10hmmb/ubuntu_privac...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
So yeah, no. To all the down-voters, they were actual ads, and they actually were in Ubuntu. Sorry.
And yeah, Windows is awful, too.
My point is that the statement that Ubuntu is without ads is not accurate. They already put ads into Ubuntu, and if currently there are no ads, there might be in the future, because now we know that they do not have an issue doing so.
Genuinely, are the folks who advocated and pushed for the Amazon tie-in even still working for Canonical?
What OS do you use?
But with 10 and 11 Windows became a massive adware, user experience plummeted, and the OS constantly gets in my way.
The only good thing about Windows in 2025 is wsl. So what does that say?
I tried daily driving Mint and I was instantly filled with nostalgia and appreciation for how the OS really tries to help me do whatever I need, gets out of the way, doesn't ask for anything or makes product "suggestions". It's so smooth and simple compared to Windows right now.
Of course it helps that by now I have more than enough Linux experience, but I would still recommend Mint over Windows to most people.
To be transparent, I use Windows Pro and am a Microsoft 365 subscriber for my business. Is this why I don't see ads?
My pipe dream is that Proton becomes so successful that it kills itself by making linux gaming profitable enough to be first party supported. My long wish of having a decent gaming and development environment will finally come true, just in time for me to not care so much about one or the other.
I'm waiting until there's a big download button on a Valve page, and ideally a supported upgrade path from an existing Windows install.
Use any low maintenance Linux distro and install Steam through flatpak and you got the exact experience you want. There is no difference. You are waiting for something which might never come out so that installing might be 10 minutes faster. That is totally absurd.
Steam OS ist not more maintenance than any other low maintenance distro.
Last year I was fed up with Windows, and switched to Linux. Since I had a lot of experience with Linux already, I went with Arch. I thought it was going to be really difficult. Sure, the initial setup was a lot of work, but now I'm extremely happy with it. Much happier than I ever was running Ubuntu, Mint, etc.
But anyway, nowadays I don't even think about that I'm running Linux anymore. I have a pretty big Steam library and play a lot of games. I install a game, I run it, and play it. I haven't found any instance where it doesn't work yet. Granted, I don't play multi-player games nor games with DRM (I'm a patient gamer, most games I play are >2 years old).
Why do you care about having that particular Arch derivative? Any mainstream distro (except Ubuntu derivatives) are perfectly usable for gaming.
There really is no point in waiting for Valve to drop their own Arch derivative. It won't do anything you can not do right now.
The thing that sucks the most (and SteamOS doesn't fix) is that the PC ecosystem is fracturing out of control. Steam alone can't do it for me - I have games now in Oculus, Meta, and Xbox. Or my favorite game (Anno 1800 being locked behind a POS Uplay launcher). Windows is the only game in town if you want to do everything, but they can't get out of their own way.
I think there is an opening for SteamOS to create console-type compatibility guarantees for a machine which also doubles as a general-purpose PC. Honestly if Valve doesn't get their act together somehow, I might just switch to a traditional console. I love Steam's Big Picture Mode, but if half my games don't even work, what's the point? (And don't get me started on how they killed the Steam Controller...)
It has a proprietary launcher for games, but also comes with Plasma Desktop.
I’ve tried using Fedora as my TV gaming rig but steamos is much better as it out of the box has everything you need. No installing extra drivers for things like Xbox controller support. And it has a fully controller navigable OS that lets you do a lot of advanced system management stuff that you’d otherwise need a mouse and keyboard for.
Also for a while now Valve has been the main contributors towards wine and other gaming on Linux projects.
Linux is nicer than Windows for developers and power users; the main issue is hardware compatibility. Preinstalls address that.
Valve tried “steam machines”, OEM devices intended to provide a console-like experience. It wasn’t a big success (although that might have been a botched implementation rather than something fundamentally wrong about the concept, IDK)
Here's one way to think about it. The Steam Machine was asking gamers to buy a new device so they can game on their TV. Its failure shows that most Steam users were happy to keep gaming on their PC.
But, almost everyone wants to buy a laptop every once in a while. And as long as you're buying a laptop, if you're a gamer, you might as well buy the gaming laptop which is running SteamOS and has really strong gaming compatibility.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.
Steam OS is much more refined now and with proton there is significantly better compatibility.
I would be definitely interested on a Steam Deck consolle-like appliance.
Of course you can just connect the steam deck to the TV, but it seems wasteful, you could have a better CPU/GPU while not need battery and screen. Also we need a new version of the steam controller!
Maybe one day.
Bazzite is a Linux operating system, built on SteamOS, that's designed to make it easy to use with different hardware and controllers. It simplifies the installation process and works really well with other game launchers that aren't on Steam, and you can set it up to look like a game console with the SteamOS interface or a regular computer with a desktop.
The only real problem I had was with competitive multiplayer shooter games require kernel-level anti-cheat software, that doesn't work with Linux.
But if playing online multiplayer isn't your main thing and you’re sick of windows being as intrusive as it is, Bazzite is an outstanding choice for a gaming or home theater computer.
I also think that nvidia might not like it, and I wonder if there are actors who can undermine steamos.
weird_trousers•6h ago
I believe that Microsoft does not care about Gaming those days, so it is definitely time for Valve to jump in and win some percentages in the market.
We know for sure that Windows shares will not drop drastically based on this move, and that the tendency will progress among years (not months). Now, we have to make sure that Valve is not evil... and I do not believe they are angels they claim since the beginning. To me Valve is like Google was in beginning of 2000s : invest on open-source, have a good fanbase, ... and once you have a significant percentage of the market share / users then you can move evil.
coffeebeqn•6h ago
Manfred•6h ago
It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.
Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.
And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
selivanovp•6h ago
Gigachad•6h ago
Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
Ygg2•6h ago
In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.
This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
ekianjo•6h ago
It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
Ygg2•4h ago
No. It's a problem, if you as distro maker support non-technical consumers as well.
Imagine troubleshooting Windows but you also have to figure out which DE, WM, libraries the user updated and so on.
> desktop side flatpak resolves many issues
You mean AppImage, Snap, etc.
tuna74•3h ago
Ygg2•1h ago
tuna74•4m ago
And if there was such a nightmare to create a distro, how come there are so many?
spookie•6h ago
ashdnazg•6h ago
If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.
Affric•5h ago
Predation: win-lose
Competition: lose-lose
This is how dynamically coupled systems work.
Ygg2•1h ago
tuna74•5h ago
xtracto•1h ago
akagusu•47m ago
Ekaros•6h ago
tuna74•5h ago
akagusu•51m ago
nfg•6h ago
I’d be interested in hearing you expand on that!
Disclaimer: I work there :-)
petepete•6h ago
* is difficult/impossible to install without tying up a Microsoft Account
* has ads baked in
* is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care
* comes preinstalled with bloat
It's a pity. There's a great OS hiding in there somewhere. A consumer version of LTSC would probably make gamers very happy.
charcircuit•6h ago
Gamers probably already have a Microsoft account as its required for games like Minecraft or services like Gamepass. A Microsoft account is needed for Windows Hello to function.
>has ads baked in
Do you have an example. I think it's more likely the user installed malware if ads are showing up unexpectedly. Gamers are more likely to install malware like this and Windows's security is not good enough to stop it especially when gamers use admin accounts and disable uac.
>is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care
How is it being forced? I haven't seen it on my machine. I assume people who don't care could just ignore it or disable the feature if they don't want it. Being able to look up help for games using Copilot seems like a feature that gamers may find valuable.
>comes preinstalled with bloat
Bloat is subjective. Actual performance issues caused by unneeded things running while in games would be. The mere existence of unused pteinstalled applications doesn't necessarily cause problems to gamers.
Gigachad•5h ago
petepete•5h ago
If I want to use these things let me opt in.
> Do you have an example [of ads]
There are hundreds or thousands of articles on the subject. Here's one.
https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/151992/microso...
> How is it being forced?
Maybe force was too strong a word, but 'incessantly nagged regardless of previous rejection' sums it up nicely
https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/microsofts-latest-co...
> comes preinstalled with bloat
If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
When people have taken the time to write debloating scripts it's fair to say some people think it's bloated.
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
If you enjoy using it don't let my high standards stop you.
charcircuit•4h ago
This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
>Here's one.
An app store recommendation is not an ad. The OS is helping the user find content that they may be looking for. It isn't an ad surface where companies are bidding to show up for keywords. The word ad is used by the article to stir drama and drive clicks.
>If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
tauoverpi•3h ago
> This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
Opt-out security is the better model to have but I don't see how security features require a microsoft account to function. This isn't the case on any other operating system as security is not bound to having an account for some external service. Rather this seems like an artificial limitation that microsoft has created to push other microsoft services on the user as someone that only uses windows to play steam games that don't use a microsoft account have no use for one regardless if they use windows or not.
Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?
> But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient unless the app store is so complex that it's practically unusable for the majority. The majority are also capable of using phones to install games, netflix, and other applications without having to be tech savy to do so.
Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store (usually the elderly) either have family that help them set things up or simply aren't your customers as they don't own computers.
ekianjo•6h ago
weird_trousers•4h ago
I know this comes from the Microsoft management side, and not from the devs.
owebmaster•57m ago
Business dark patterns aren't bugs nor something you can change :)