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Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

(arstechnica.com)
433 points Sporktacular | 5 comments | 04 Aug 23 00:36 UTC | HN request time: 2.142s | source
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bnralt ◴[04 Aug 23 10:54 UTC] No.36998151[source]▶
> Meanwhile, Apple has been making a lot of noise about making the Mac a more viable gaming platform, given the exceptionally strong graphics performance (for integrated graphics on a laptop, at least) of the M1 and M2 series chips in the latest Macs.

Mac was actually doing pretty decently for game a few years back. A pretty big chunk of the games on Steam, including many of the high profile games, were available on OSX. Dropping 32-bit support set things back immensely, however. With that one decision, Apple made the number of games available to OSX users a small fraction of the amount that was available before.

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1. jsheard ◴[04 Aug 23 13:40 UTC] No.36999888[source]▶
It's probably only a matter of time before Apple drops support for OpenGL and/or x64 binaries, which would wipe out another whole chunk of Mac gaming history.

PowerPC binaries are no longer usable, x86 binaries are no longer usable, I don't see why they wouldn't do it again in the name of streamlining the platform.

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2. als0 ◴[04 Aug 23 13:52 UTC] No.37000042[source]▶
> x86 binaries are no longer usable

What do you mean by this? Rosetta 2 is very fast and it runs a lot of x86 apps well.

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3. jsheard ◴[04 Aug 23 13:55 UTC] No.37000097[source]▶
I meant x86 as in 32-bit Intel, as opposed to x64 or x86-64 or AMD64 or whatever you want to call it.

Catalina ended support for 32-bit binaries even on Intel Macs, and Rosetta2 could never run 32-bit code.

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4. n6h6 ◴[04 Aug 23 18:23 UTC] No.37003798{3}[source]▶
> or whatever you want to call it

I feel for you lmao. Technology naming conventions are a shitshow, and CPU architecture is no exception.

5. philistine ◴[04 Aug 23 21:38 UTC] No.37006238[source]▶
Apple is a weird company. They are absurdly proud of Rosetta 2. It’s one of the most impressive codebase in the world.

And Apple is working as hard as possible to remove it as soon as possible.