Linux overtakes Mac as Steam's second-most used OS, thanks to the Steam Deck

But what you're writing is basically what Linux gamers were writing for many years - even before Valve started focusing on it too.

That's the one bad experience I had with the game - in Steam it is already marked as available on Mac OS but after downloading the 100GB it tells you that it's actually still the Early Access version (with incompatible save files!) and you have to wait till September for the actual game. Which meant another 110GB download on my fallback device.

That Apple made GPT but then ignores this obvious route, instead thinking it will somehow mobilize game developers to port their games natively to their bespoke low-level graphics API is ridiculous - "you see, they just didn't know about the graphics capabilities of Apple Silicon before!". Yeah, right.

Lots of game developers can barely be convinced to release usable Windows binaries, see also the mess of badly performing DX12 games (which is more like a low-level console API that needs optimization to perform) vs yeet the pixels out DX11.

Apple are doing something very similar already with their Game Porting Kit framework. It supports DX12 games translated to Metal and runs very well. This effort only become public this year, though, so the fruits of that labour are yet to be borne.

The only real impediment is that they need to care. The one thing in common across all successful gaming platforms is that the platform owner cares a lot and works closely with game devs to make things work:

- Microsoft/Nvidia/AMD ship game-specific patches and optimizations for Windows games

- console makers work closely with third-party devs and give advice, feedback, certification, etc.

- Valve specifically has put tons of effort into SteamOS and certifies individual games as ready/not ready for the Steam Deck

All it takes is a platform owner who cares, and cares on the level of interventions for particular games, but this is totally foreign to Apple's DNA (both in general, and for games in particular). They'd need a huge culture shift.

Civ 6, Stellaris, and Factorio I own copies / licenses of and all three have native builds for Linux so I'd be _amazed_ if they did not also have native builds for OSX too (or failing that, at least the Linux builds should be usable).

But I'm guessing the reason they don't is because there are some non-superficial differences.

Given the popularity of Steam, it's a high-visibility, high-priority application, which means your distro may be running it in one of three ways:

1) A snap

2) A flatpak

3) Your distro's native packaging format (deb/rpm, etc.)

So yeah, there might be a bit of variation there. I've already had a handful of problems on the Steam Flatpak on Fedora in which it's been suggested that I should switch to the RPMFusion Steam rpm instead, but so far I have resisted.

The fact that Steam is a program that installs other programs means that it will frequently test the boundaries of the OS and package format's security models.

One minor correction, Modern Steam OS is Arch-based, not Ubuntu-based, but your point still stands.

There was the famous "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux" article last year which pretty much about this https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

As you said, easier/better to target Win32 and just use Proton.

It's also funny because it kinda became true on another level as "Win32 Is Only Stable on Linux". It's easier to run old games and softwares (XP era and earlier) with Proton under Linux than on current Windows 10/11

If you need Windows to play Call of Duty, you're probably going to stick with Windows for everything because of the hassle.

My understanding is there is no technical reason these anti-cheats cannot work via Proton, but the anti-cheat makers will ban if they figure out you're not on Windows out of some weird fear of people having root access to the system. I could be wrong, however.

With every new release of hardware or software that Apple makes, fewer and fewer of the existing game library on MacOS (Steam or otherwise) continue to work; it's absolutely absurd. You know you can't even play Bejeweled on a modern mac, right? How am I supposed to explain that to a widow with Alzehimers who just wants to keep playing the games she remembers? (This actually happened. I had to fucking wine-bottle the windows version myself)

Of 502 games in my Steam library only 163 will run on an Apple Silicon mac. Big kudos to the game authors who even bother anymore.

I've been playing War Thunder simulator battles in VR for the past few weeks, and have gotten serious enough about it that I've upgraded my PC and dropped ~$400 on a HOTAS setup.

I'm using my Quest 2 because there's really no other viable options. The resolution isn't high enough to be "good", but it's simply the best available at the moment. I'm anxiously awaiting the Quest 3 and will buy it at release.

There are some headsets out there now with higher resolution, but they're very expensive, hard to actually find for sale, from a small/unknown manufacturer, or all of the above.