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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Does Mac not do Steam gaming the same way? In Linux I just press install and it works with my AMD card. I haven't pressed any other buttons. Fedora 42

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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.

> Linux ABI is available— Win32

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

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).

Lots of older Mac Steam games support 64-bit but show the incompatibility warning in the store anyway. It’s annoying but with Steam’s return policy it’s not a real risk to test such games.

Lots of newer Mac Steam games do this as well. It's quite annoying as it also hides them from your library when you use the macOS filter.

Yes, but I am not running games for Linux. I play mostly games that are built for Windows, but they just launch in Linux because Valve made Proton.

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.

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