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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

I just found it surprising how dead it is (according to Steam, anyways). Apple will have to do something drastic (and uncharacteristic) to recover.

> Does that 2.08% Linux include the Deck btw?

[edit] I think I was wrong, see sibling comment which indicates that 41% of Linux users are on the Deck's OS.

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The Deck shows up as "Steam OS Holo". Which is 41% of the Linux category (or 0.85% overall). For whatever reason Valve never updated the combined view to show Steam OS Holo.

I wonder if I'm counted once, thrice or four times. I've ran Steam at least once on both windows and linux on the x86 box and on both macs...

Edit to answer the reply below this one:

I have no idea how many times I got the hardware survey popup, but I always click Yes on it. It's possible I wasn't counted for Linux because I don't really use that install. The x86 box is headless and I steam stream games off it to the macs that have monitors. That doesn't seem to work from Linux.

Unless things have changed, the survey is opt-in and thus it's a statistical sampling. Over the many, many years[0] that I've run Steam, I've gotten the survey pop-up maybe 4-5 times, although I'm not a heavy gamer so Steam isn't installed and running all the time.

[0] Since HL2 or maybe the Orange Box. I'm old.

A good start would be to support some existing API (Vulcan and OpenGL) instead of making their own (Metal).

Or throw in the towel and do what Linux gaming did and just make a compatibility layer for Windows APIs and DirectX (wine/proton). Though this compatibility layer stuff has big issues with anti cheat software making it not really suitable for many online games.

Games written with Vulkan can run on MacOS with the help of the MoltenVK [1]. You don't need to rewrite the game, just recompile for MacOS. The game can use Vulkan API but loads the MoltenVK shared library at runtime. It acts as a translation layer for Metal which is very similar to Vulkan. There are some gotchas, such as you can not use geometry shaders because Metal does not support them.

[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

> You don't need to rewrite the game, just recompile for MacOS.

The word "just" does a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. First you need to get your game running on ARM64, which likely won't work out-of-the-box unless you already ported to smartphone/Nintendo Switch. Then you simply map all the functionality to MacOS syscalls, debug a second version of your game, polish it, and release it but without Metal support so you can use MoltenVK to run it. The number of video games that fall into this category of "released for 64-bit MacOS but doesn't support Metal" is minuscule. 99% of the video games released today are an x86 Windows binary, and if you can't run that you're boned. Developers will not build you a special MacOS version of their Vulkan game so you can mess around with translation layers.

You could also use Linux and get upstream Vulkan drivers that work out-of-the-box. Apple's obsession over Metal is part of the reason I left MacOS and I truly pity anyone that depends on MoltenVK to run their favorite software.

Yeah the fact that you have to compile a separate binary is already too much work for most developers. Just not worth the effort for less then 2% market share.

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