I tried Windows gaming on a Mac
andrewethanzeng.com
andrewethanzeng.com
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.
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.
https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
EDIT: it seems that at some point in the past month the author stated whisky is no longer maintained!
https://github.com/Whisky-App/whisky-book/commit/463bfc39a6f...
They don't even support excluding the notch from fullscreen apps yet, so if you run a game in fullscreen or fullscreen borderless, the screen notch can obscure UI elements (as it does for me in Volcanoids - the timer until the volcano erupts is just a bit important, given that it dictates the entire gameplay loop).
However, I have been able to run R.E.P.O., Trailmakers, BeamNG.drive, and Cosmoteer, so it's not like nothing at all works, it's just hit or miss.
I rather play games on windows because I don't like the nuisance of trying to do it on mac. There is always some wonkiness that I don't even bother to remember the details of, because the solution is just to do it on windows.
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.
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
I daily drive MacOS, Windows 11 and Linux Mint on different devices and Windows doesn't particularly bother me post de-bloating, and it easily has the most reliable multi monitor/variable DPI when docking/undocking of the three in my experience.
Glad it's still working for some folks.
I must recognise that there is some overlap on the dev functionality now that WSL is a thing... years back it was crazy talk to try to do Rails on windows.
There’s a tiny bit of latency, but I’m not playing twitch reflex games on it.
If you enjoy tinkering, setting up Linux or a Mac for gaming can be a fun project, but it's not a good use of your time if your goal is to play games well. You'll jump through a lot of hoops and maybe get something 70% as good.
The amount of time we specifically use the spare Windows PC as the Steam Link source is pretty low. Most of the time we connect to our media server, which is the Linux machine.
The idea that it's "only 70%" to me is pretty mind boggling. I think there is a lot of the experience that works correctly because of properly supported hardware (AMD)
nice
Out of curiosity, does kid-you remember whether the drive came poorly tuned from the factory or if it drifted after the fact. (Or perhaps it was the disk at fault, having been written on a poorly tuned drive.)
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.
- Just download the Game Porting Toolkit from Apple
- Use Porting Kit
- Dual-boot Asahi Linux and game from that partition
I've used all of these, and they all seem to perform about the same for me.
Mac users are generally running on aarch64 rather than x86, so you have the binary compatibility barrier. Plus no 32bit support.
Yep!
> Mac users are generally running on aarch64 rather than x86, so you have the binary compatibility barrier. Plus no 32bit support.
That's not really the reason. Rosetta exists and quote good. Macos binaries don't work because Apple breaks its own compatibility (including 32 bit thing), and windows binaries don't work because Apple don't support vulkan nor opengl, and, maybe even more important, no one has incentive to fix it
I don't know much about it because I only use x86 on my workstations, but I believe it even can work across architecture because the Pi guys have done that too.
Blizzard got derailed by Activision and probably cannot be saved now after at least a decade of solid management into the ground.
Though really I’d probably just keep gaming on the Deck, that lives in the living room; the Mac is at the studio desk or a table in a cafe doing work, and it’s nice to not have a pile of games right there offering to distract me…
75Hz would be acceptable however macOS has funky mouse acceleration that makes gaming feel weird.
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.
Meanwhile, some random nerds put them to shame by providing LTS by just having a mailing list.
None of that sounds amazing. If you want to play these games without a windows machine, a steam deck seems a much better option.
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.