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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

It’s pretty bad. IPC doesn’t work reliably any more. The window manager is unusable. Spotlight misses results and also pegs the cpu, killing battery.

Finder is bad enough on its own, but the 1:N mapping from logical directories to filesystem directories (like photos, home, applications, etc) makes it essentially unusable without spotlight.

Notifications are flaky as hell (missing phone calls and messages from contacts, but displaying explicitly blocked spam sms).

Copy paste between devices has never worked right.

Which part of the OS is not terrible in your experience?

Edit: also, compatibility with video games (even ones released for macos) is abysmal. It’s much worse than Linux’s ability to run the Windows version of MacOS native releases!

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Which part of the OS is not terrible in your experience?

Not OP, but accessibility tools on mac put other desktop OSes to shame.

> Edit: also, compatibility with video games (even ones released for macos) is abysmal. It’s much worse than Linux’s ability to run the Windows version of MacOS native releases!

Linux can run Windows native games because Valve has shoved millions and millions into perfecting Proton.

And I still wonder why Apple hasn't just dumped a billion on Valve's door to build a similar tool for macOS.

Apple’s ‘Game Porting Toolkit’ is basically Proton; they just haven’t made a GUI for it.

The issue with that it requires the dev to do a "port". Proton requires absolutely nothing.

Are you sure? Port may be in the name, but it seemed like people were using it like Proton, random users trying it with various games. Not sure if this is still happening. There was also Whisky, but that's been abandoned. "Wine Supercharged... with the power of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit."

It seemed like you could just play games with it, but that Apple didn't want you using it that way.

Apple highlights a different use case than Valve, but the underlying program is equivalent.

They’re both forks of wine ( https://www.winehq.org ) - the game porting toolkit's main addition is that it'll also convert Vulkan shaders to Metal.

Setup is more of a hassle because it's not integrated into Steam, or into the OS as a handler for .exe files, etc. But you can install the Windows version of Steam using the game porting toolkit, and then download & launch windows games from there.

I suspect the main reason they don't want to pitch this as an end-user feature is that it’s dependent on their x86->ARM translation layer, which they probably want to ditch in a few years. But it’s there for now!

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