Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS The latest Steam client finally delivers on the warning from January, dropping support for several older OS versions. The client update for Valve Software's gaming service delivers improvements for folks with recent versions of Windows, Linux, and macOS, but for users of older OSes, it's bad news. The November 2024 Steam …
"Using a Mac for gaming is the triumph of hope over experience and an exercise in masochism, just use something else."
While this is totally true as of now (no more X64, Metal as a proprietary API, neverending changes in the OS that disrupt almost everything), gaming used to be a thing on Macs long ago.
My venerable Macbook 2012 (Catalina) still runs a handfull of them, even some recent ones (Hades, yes, you read it correctly, Hades runs on Catalina !).
But now, it will soon end, /tears ...
Anything relying on Rosetta 2 will stop working in the near future, so that means 64-bit Windows on Crossover and 64-bit Intel Mac games (32-bit Intel Mac games are already dead).
And this is on top of an old version of Open GL, an esoteric Graphics API instead of Vulkan, and poor GPUs on Intel which has dissuaded which has dissuaded many developers over the past decade or so.
So you will be left with running Windows games which run on Windows 11 a Windows VM and letting that emulate Intel and running games from those developers who target ARM on Mac (approx 300 games available). Nothing particularly compelling about that.
Unlike the original PowerPc Rosetta, Rosetta 2 is developed internally by Apple and is the basis of game porting toolkit a Crossover derivative, virtualization tools and have mentioned Whisky in keynotes in the past.
It's also not the only X86 to ARM translator for Mac. Asahi linux have a linux version that does the same thing and now with the Vulkan drivers you can run x86 games in Asahi linux.
Unlike the original PowerPc Rosetta, Rosetta 2 is developed internally by Apple and is the basis of game porting toolkit a Crossover derivative, virtualization tools and have mentioned Whisky in keynotes in the past.
Yes, the Game Porting Toolkit, but that isn't designed to be used by end customers, only developers and only if they choose to put the time into developing Mac games. Given the number of developers that bothered to recompile 32-bit into 64-bit when MacOS dropped 32-bit Intel support, I can't imagine it's going to be a game changer now.
On the other hand a Linux OS running Proton is designed to be run by the end customer and can make older Windows games run on Linux, you just have to try it to find out, if the latest version doesn't work, one of the previous versions might.
It's also not the only X86 to ARM translator for Mac. Asahi linux have a linux version that does the same thing and now with the Vulkan drivers you can run x86 games in Asahi linux.
This is impressive but in early stages and is more of a reason for gaming on Linux than MacOS.
I got a 13" MacBook Pro back in 2011 for my college studies (at the time the family computer was a mac mini). The intel IGPU was never going to be great, but it could sort of run WoW and a few other games. Sadly Apple didn't seem to have realised that computers run really hot when they don't have any ventilation in the casework whatsoever. After a year or two of that treatment I more or less cooked it....no, they're really not suited for gaming.
On a more pleasing note it still survives as a daily driver, running Ubuntu 24.04 with no issues.
Gaming these days is done on a W10 desktop but I'm increasingly building up the confidence to switch it to a good solid Linux distro.
From the ioQuake home page:
"This is the main macOS build link, we also have extra builds from developer Tom Kidd:
* Legacy Universal 1 Build for PowerPC, Intel 32 bit, and Intel 64 bit
* Universal 2 Build for Intel 64 bit and Apple Silicon (M1)"
I can't help imagine a conversation starting somewhat like this: A man walks by an alleyway entrance. From within the alley, a quiet voice calls out, "Psst, Buddy! Yeah, you, Mister Game Company President. My associates and I have a deal for you. We pay you to do -- nothing! That's right, an extra revenue stream for you, in exchange for simply dropping support on selected OS versions and hardware models. Whadda ya say?"
As a Steam Deck owner, I have to say that it is looking increasingly likely that I will move to a Linux based gaming laptop in the future.
The compatibility has been excellent, mostly through Valve's huge support via Proton etc. to make Wine do what it's supposed to do.
In several instances, I have games which no longer run on Windows 10 or 11. You have to jump through hoops and change DLLs to get past compatibility problems and errors, and even then things don't always work. Hell, one wanted to install DirectPlay the other day which apparently needs a reboot and my 5-year-old PC with 1000+ games on it didn't have it installed already!
I loaded the same games on my Steam Deck. Native Linux. They just downloaded. I clicked. They just ran.
The scout/sniper/etc. compatibility layers are amazing and even as a indie developer I was making my game on Windows and just sending it to the Deck and it "just worked". I will make a Linux-native version (and hope to release on Steam) because it doesn't take much but the fact that I haven't had to, for a program that Valve has never seen... that's some great backwards compatibility there.
Valve should be praised for this. They started with the idea back when Steam "Machine" / "Boxes" where a thing - desktop PCs without Windows, aimed at gamers. It was loved but kinda flopped because the compatibility wasn't there. So Valve spent years and just fixed that. And tried again with the Steam Deck. And they did an amazing job, and still are.
And now I'm seriously considering my own "Steam Box" on an ordinary laptop that I will use for everything else I do too. Windows 11 has no appeal to me. And if the vast majority of my 22-year-old library can just play without hassle... I'm happy and don't care about the latest AAA.
Valve basically standardised PC VR gaming, and gaming "emulation" via Wine on Linux, by throwing money, time, effort and hope at it. I feel they deserve my money for that.
One of the reasons it works so well I think, is because they managed to avoid the temptation to go for am ARM CPU. Nothing wrong with ARM in theory and indeed they SHOULD be much better for an embedded platform like SteamDeck, but in practice it is troublesome for compatibility and would have presented a real headache for Valve (because most games were compiled once for x86 and then forgotten about) Yes there are emulators, but they suck.
I would recommend it, honestly. I switched almost completely over to Linux about a year ago and I have zero regrets. Almost everything I try to do works out of the box and the of the few that don't, most of those have pretty simple workarounds. The only things I've encountered a brick wall on were digital signing, which you can do on Linux but seems to be much harder than on Windows, and the gacha game Wuthering Waves, which has pretty insistent anti-cheat. But even those aren't really brick walls if I'm being honest - they're more like a puzzle I couldn't devote enough time to figuring out, but other users could and did. And the user experience of Linux is so, so much better than Windows, hands down. I'm never going back unless I'm forced to.
I lived and worked on Slackware for 10 years, ironically while managing Windows networks. Hell, I owned an original Crossover Office licence many years ago (because Word was the standard and I had a CD copy of Word 2000 which worked fine on my Slackware machine).
It's more than feasible for me. I actually don't like systemd at all, to be honest, and that's rapidly becoming a reason not to move (but it's a comparatively minor one compared to the Windows obsoletion and quirks... it's almost like the guy who wrote that junk then went and worked for Microsoft... weird...)
I've taken, even on Windows, to finding open-source or freeware for everything I do, and I have almost zero proprietary apps and certainly none that I couldn't live without or find a suitable replacement for (I just happen to like those particular programs). All of them would work under Wine on Linux.
Games are a big category and the historical blocker for personal use. Steam Deck / Proton basically solves that for me. Anti-cheat really doesn't matter to me, I rarely play online and when I do it's usually a Valve product.
I'm also looking at a Framework laptop. I just wished they made bigger screens / more official GPU choices. But at least I can remove the Microsoft Windows product from the basket if I buy one of those. It's a small message to send, but a necessary one.
Increasingly, it looks like that's the way I will go. I just might let this laptop die first which will give me an excuse to buy a more expensive "emergency" replacement...
I still have a Crossover Office licence, renewed annually, simply because it lets me run a couple of obscure programs on my Debian box. I know I don't *need* to keep it updated, but it's a way to give a bit back to the Wine project.
My own transition away from Windows was done in the same way; move over to open-source for most things, then taking the plunge is so much more straightforward. I have windows builds on various VMs that I fell back on in the early days but I rarely need to use them any more.
But yes, buy the best hardware you can and resist the temptation to run Linux on the oldest machine, because the resulting experience will be horrible!
All of my gaming is done on Linux, and it's fantastic. I recently built a PC that lives in my entertainment center below my 4K TV. It replaced a Playstation 3, as I had drifted away from gaming over the years. Getting a Steam Deck changed that, and as I have been a Linux user for decades already, Linux was an obvious choice (thanks to the work Valve has done) for my new home-built gaming "console". It's running Bazzite as the OS, which I highly recommend for a gaming rig. Bazzite gives any PC a nearly identical experience to the Steam Deck. I have a couple PS5 controllers, a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth trackpad, and everything runs great, from 30-year-old pc games, to new AAA titles. I'm even emulating some old console games. I did throw an extra blank NVMe drive that I had sitting around in there, anticipating that one day I may feel the need to throw Windows on it to play some game that uses a kernel-level anti-cheat and thus won't work with Proton. It's now been 3 months, and that drive is still unformatted.
Link to Bazzite for any who are interested:
https://bazzite.gg/
Absolutely. Wine is very impressive for free, but quite honestly it can be a colossal pain in the neck for serious use by itself. You should absolutely be using Crossover or a Steam Deck if this is an option. Forget about non Linux platforms, the API coverage on e.g. FreeBSD is substantially lower than under Linux and Wine FreeBSD has broken at least twice in the last year or so I've been using it, for multi week periods.
It's also not just that Proton et al under a Steam Deck is a good idea, it's now gained enough critical mass for developers to cater for the API coverage, form factor, and performance of a Steam Deck.
Please don't dilute what is now a new standard gaming platform by opting for a Steam Deck a like Windows based alternative, or creating your own 'Steam Box' if you can reasonably afford to buy a Steam Deck yourself (if you can't afford a Steam Deck, using a Steam Box platform and buying Steam games to work under Linux will at least have some of the same effect).
The Steam Deck may have gained a foothold, but it's still not a concrete one; recently a Steam Deck certified game lost compatibility due to its revised anti cheat technology being incompatible with the Linux kernel. There's not yet a sufficient number of users to offset the perceived commercial advantages of catering only to the Windows market.
Go for it.
I've been using Linux (Mint in my case) as my primary game rig for almost 2 years now. Set it up as a dual boot, but honestly haven't even booted up the Windows 10 drive for hmm, 6 months I think at this point. Don't miss it at all.
There was some rough edges when I initially started, the odd tweak here and there to get something new to run, but for older titles (RA2, C&C Generals etc) they honestly (for me anyway) worked better under Proton than I ever got them working under Win 10. Less crashing etc.
But even the tweaking isn't really needed these days, and new titles just work out of the box!
A recent example (very recent, as in just a few hours ago) 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl' just released on Windows, brand new today, Windows only. It works fine under Linux, and judging by forum posts on Steam, quite a few people on Windows are having issues! (Does need some optimisation, but that's nothing to do with Linux).
The one exception I would say for competitive multiplayer games. Although this depends on the game. Some of these contain kernel level anti cheat systems that don't always play nice via Proton. But I don't really play those games, so haven't had that issue myself.
The only multiplayer game I play occasionally is War Thunder, and they have a native Linux client anyway (Tip: don't install WT via Steam, it messes with settings every time it updates, grab it from the distro software manager, or via the web site).
Check out the protondb site if you have any specific games in mind.
[Author here]
> So, end of support for Win 7 (15 years old)
And the 2 versions after that. But that's not the point.
> and for Unbunto more than 5 years old.
What's with the spelling?
Anyway, no, that was not the point either.
The points were:
1. Hidden or non-obvious dependencies can force vendors' hands. The Steam client is based on Chrome and it can't support things Chrome doesn't.
2. That has downstream effects: if Chrome stops supporting 32-bit OSes, then lots of other things will too.
3. Thus a web browser affects the greater ecosystem of non-web-related apps.
Parenthetical unrelated point 4:
If you're running an unsupported Mac, here is where to go and how to get there.
Despite some inroads recently with the game porting toolkit, plus some triple A titles being released with macOS support, the OS is so far behind the curve when it comes to gaming, it's sad.
Doubly sad considering the power of the M4 chip.
Unless you really must game on macOS and are fine with trying out Crossover, you'll be far better off just getting a steam deck or a dedicated gaming PC.
I've cranked up Crossover on the M4 and it's impressive - a fair few Steam games run relatively well - but it's so hit and miss.
It feels like Linux gaming a decade ago.
I'm a Linux user for gaming (and some work related stuff)
And a windows user - only for VR gaming.
Until someone like Valve are prepared to shake up gaming on macOS, it will never be a truly useful gaming platform.
And Valve aren't going to do that - why would they?
The did it for Linux for many reasons, but one of them is certainly related to control and revenue.
The Linux community got the benefits of all that research, the culmination being the Steam Deck - win-win for everyone.
The game porting toolkit is only really useful if a third party want to take up the mantle and do what Valve did for Linux gaming on the Steam Platform.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
Mac OS if less than 10% market share.
Nobody is going to bother with all the effort Valve went through (which I salute) to bring gaming to such a feeble revenue stream.
I have a colleague who is entirely Apple-brainwashed. He has an MAC OS ARM laptop, on which he games, because he is subscribed to a gaming service which allows him to basically VPN into a PC and play.
In other words, he doesn't use his MAC to play, he uses it to log into a proper PC and game from there.
And he can't stop telling me how practical it is.
I'm glad he's having fun with his monthly subscription.
[Author here]
> Mac OS if less than 10% market share.
How odd to bother to manually insert a hyperlink but not to check all the words were the right words.
Anyway: as Dr Ben Goldacre often says, "I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than that."
For instance you are missing at least 3 greater points here, all of which were reasons I wrote this article.
1. Don't be deceived by market share numbers. For example:
* Market share often counts unit numbers, which distorts financial value; or it counts unit profit, which distorts numbers.
Macs sell well. Macs have survived for 40 years of loud, confident, wrong people maintaining that all we need are PCs.
*How* have Macs survived so long? One aspect is margin.
Apple does not make junk Macs. There have never been Macs with Atom, Celeron, "Pentium Dual Core" or other rotten under-performing cut-down processors.
Old PCs with those things in are junk and you can't upgrade them to run well, because they did not run well when new.
What can we learn from this?
* PCs are a high volume/low margin business. That leads to crappy PCs.
* Macs are a low volume/high margin business. That leads to several things:
- Apple surviving nearly 50 years now.
- Old Macs were never junk and thus are still entirely usable and useful.
- Macs continuing to sell despite all the PC fanboys calling them names.
- Providing Apple the money to fund development of a highly competitive OS that has kept Microsoft on its toes trying to catch up, and kept Microsoft supporting its mortal rival for decades.
- And which has kept Linux from competing on the desktop.
- Although it provided a model of Linux to copy on phones, which obliterated Windows on phones.
It also highlights the foolishness of people who try to compare numbers of a product with a 30+% profit margin with the numbers of products with single-digit profit margins.
Another thing we can learn from this:
* Microsoft acolytes whinging that they can't live without Windows because all the apps they need are Windows apps are wrong.
Those of us with Clue 1 knew this, but the commercial proof is that there are now commercially viable products on sale to the general public which work entirely by emulating Windows well enough to run Windows apps _well_ on non-Windows OSes.
* The flipside of the margin/sales model is Chromebooks. Everyone decries Chromebooks but they work well enough to sell in the hundreds of millions.
And yet the foolish, loud and ignorant crowd talk about market share without realising that Apple's ~10% or whatever conceals the fact that this one company makes more profit from its ten percent than the other 90% makes.
Percentages confuse those who don't pay attention. Your first line proved you don't pay attention.
Pay attention.
The other thing that the percentage-market-share thing shows those with critical and analytical thinking skills are that Linux on the desktop is pretty big, because Macs are expensive yet make 10% of the market, while Chromebooks are cheap and so if 3% of sales or something are Chromebooks that means COMPANIES ARE SELLING LOTS AND LOTS OF CHROMEBOOKS.
The numbers do not tell the whole story. They do not tell the story you think they do.
What games are you talking about? My M3 Macbook Air with 24 gb ram plays almost everything decently apart from graphicaly intensive console focussed AAAs once you get crossover and vmware fusion for 32 bit installed. That's more due to the gpu in a base m4 or m3 being around 4-5 tflops. A PS5 is almost 10 tflops.
But those few select graphical intensive titles is what I use my PS5 for.
With a few easy steps you can also do a workaround to install the EA App as a non-steam game under Steam.
The only thing I worry about is the EA anti-cheat systems permabanning your account (without recourse) as there were some incidents when Steam started selling some of the Battlefield games.
It sounds like these were reverted but it is a bit concerning.
Anyone have Epic working under Steam on Linux yet? It looks like you can use an alternate (Heroic) launcher or potentially Lutris.
I'll have to invest some time in this is the last group of software I keep Windows around for.
I don't know where you get the idea that DRM is the default if even the page you linked to gives you an example DRM wrapper script you need to run as part of the store submission process to add Steam DRM to your exe. And Valve even admit that Steam DRM is easily bypassed.
One thing is the Steam DRM (account verification) and another thing is Steamworks services like multiplayer, trading cards, etc... Some games may degrade gracefully if Steam is not available, others may effectively use Steamworks services as DRM by refusing to work if they're not available.
The 'Native for Linux' mode is something I used to be a big fan of, but in hindsight, ProtonGE works much better.
For instance the Total War series has games that work natively in Linux, and segfault repeatedly. Under ProtonGE, no issue whatsoever.
Can and will vary naturally, sample size of 1 etc, but still, Proton is much more stable in my experience (7 years or so of using Steam + Proton).
https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam.CompatibilityTool.Proton-GE
It's also noticeable how Valve is getting Proton very performant/stable, gone are the days where PGE was essential to run a game, now it's nice to have for edge cases or the occassional performance boost, mostly vanilla proton does quite well.
Gone are the days as well where I'd set each game to one specific 'known good' Proton version, for most games you can just set it to latest and not run into issues.
"which allows players to save sessions and share clips with friends."
Greybeards remember being bored to tears going to friend's homes and being subjected to slide shows of their friend's vacations. Actual kodachrome slide shows, not the infinitely more painful slide decks of powerpoint.
I have no desire (kill me please) to watch someone's clip of a steam session.
Play? Yes. Watch? NO.
I can't play video games (I always get to a point where I'm completely stuck) so yes, I have several dozen YouTube channels where I watch people play games I'm interested in.
For example, I'm stuck halfway though Tears Of The Kingdom, and I'm also stuck at the end stage of the latest Pikmin where they switched to a speedrun format.
The only games I've ever been good at were HALO and Kerbal Space Program.
I also like video games much more than my skill at playing them justifies, lol. I get stuck a lot, and as I age, my reflexes aren't getting any better. Not long ago, there was a Steam sale on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, and I had great memories of playing them on Playstation back in the day, so I bought them. It turns out my memories were a bit hazy, but after an hour or so of playing, I remembered that I always sucked at getting the achievements needed to move on to the next skate park. I would have a friend get me to the next place, even when I was young and spry. I may never pass the very first level on my own, but I should probably try again soon.
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