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M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS

(eclecticlight.co)
176 points Brajeshwar | 6 comments | 16 Nov 24 16:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Terretta ◴[16 Nov 24 20:01 UTC] No.42158813[source]▶
Commenters lament that Rosetta will go away before users are ready.

In my opinion, Rosetta should be more heavily gated* to push everyone from Adobe to Steam to build for aarch64. Countless "Apple Silicon native" claiming tools require Rosetta under the hood for dependencies or even (bless their hearts) only their installer.

* Like right-click to open packages or install not-from app store, except Rosetta dialog should note that once it's installed any other old software not made for this system will run without warning. Turns out avoiding Rosetta is a great way to ensure not just apps but your CLI tools are all up to date... Alternatively, make Rosetta sandboxed with apps, and/or let it be turned off again more reasonably than the safe-mode surgery required now.

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1. Macha ◴[16 Nov 24 20:26 UTC] No.42159013[source]▶
> In my opinion, Rosetta should be more heavily gated* to push everyone from Adobe to Steam to build for aarch64.

Honestly I see game developers simply abandoning MacOS (more than they already have) if they need to do more work on their back catalogues. Nobody at Adobe cares if CS3 doesn't run on the latest MacOS, it's no longer a revenue source for them. EA would care a lot more if all their games older than 4 years needed work to run on MacOS, there's a lot more long tail revenue in games (but a lot of that is over aggregated back catalogues where the revenue per title is pretty low even if they sum up to a significant amount) than there is in the more typical B2C cloud SaaS attached apps that the App Store model is designed to serve.

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2. david38 ◴[17 Nov 24 01:54 UTC] No.42161328[source]▶
How is Mac no longer a revenue stream for Adobe?
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3. bydo ◴[17 Nov 24 02:56 UTC] No.42161631[source]▶
Poster specifically mentioned CS3, which was a perpetual license. Adobe is not incentivized to keep a version of their software someone purchased once seventeen years ago working when they would much rather sell a monthly subscription.
4. andrewmcwatters ◴[17 Nov 24 02:57 UTC] No.42161639[source]▶
The final straw for me was Apple deprecating modern OpenGL. There's no quick and easy solution to migrating even to Metal. So, they shafted us, and I'll never recommend another game developer bother with an Apple device ever again.

Use Windows for games.

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5. DamnableNook ◴[17 Nov 24 05:01 UTC] No.42162091[source]▶
But wasn’t macOS the only major gaming-relevant platform still using OpenGL anyway? If you’re already writing a Mac-specific backend, why not just write directly for Metal instead of OpenGL? Or, at the least, write for Vulkan and use a translation layer like MoltenVK?
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6. talldayo ◴[17 Nov 24 17:39 UTC] No.42165529{3}[source]▶
> But wasn’t macOS the only major gaming-relevant platform still using OpenGL anyway?

At the time, there was a decent number of non-gaming cross-platform applications that relied on OpenGL for rendering. OpenGL wasn't perfect (especially compared to DirectX 9) but it was a good-enough solution for simpler apps and games that wanted the write-once-run-anywhere treatment.

> If you’re already writing a Mac-specific backend, why not just write directly for Metal instead of OpenGL?

Because a lot of people don't write Mac specific backends in the first place. Unless the app was designed to be Mac native from the start (a rarity in the professional world), there is very little impetus to rewrite everything to work with Metal and/or AArch64 targets. OpenGL suggested a future world where this would be unneccesary, and people liked it. With Metal as the only option now, a lot of people feel like Apple slammed the door on people that wanted to write cross-platform apps supporting Mac.

> Or, at the least, write for Vulkan and use a translation layer like MoltenVK?

MoltenVK is too slow for games (compared to DXVK it is an utter slouch) so most people don't even bother. There are a few apps that you can run in it, but for the most part it is a toy that rightfully isn't relied upon to deliver industry-standard experiences.