6 ms·

Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both companies. Apple has done some work wit

Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both companies. Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine and Rosetta. But this isn’t officially pitched as tool for end users to run Windows games.

MBCook 3y ago
> if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first. They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS. The Mac is worse than an afterthought.
- augusto-moura 3y ago
  Valve already had Wine on Linux to work with. Although we have Wine on Mac now, it is a subpar experience. Aside from that, Vulkan on MacOS never received official support from Apple I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the two. If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple, if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor lock-in style
  - MBCook 3y ago
    None of that explains why the Steam client on Mac is so terrible and has been for a very long time. Games have their own issues (you mentioned some). But the client is inexcusable.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      What's so bad about it? It used to be dog slow and horribly buggy but recently it's been quite fine. More and more games run native as well.
- adhamsalama 3y ago
  Why would Valve do this for a trillion-dollar walled-garden?
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Because at least CPU-wise, the M SoCs blast a lot of the x86/64 competition to pieces. GPU is another story, although unified memory is inherently better than the current situation on x86/64.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Why release a crappy product on Mac and leave it that way for over a decade? Don’t know. But that’s what they’ve done. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t partner with someone who clearly didn’t give 2 shits about my platform. (In reality Value doesn’t need Apple. And Apple would never partner anyway, they don’t do that)
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      Valve often does things because a person employed by Valve wanted to do that thing. And then that person moves on to other things. You don't need any grander explanation for "Valve ported the Steam launcher to OS X and now barely maintains it".
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Also, since I can’t edit my other reply, the Mac is not a walled garden. You can use any tool to make apps and sell them online without having to get them approved in the Mac App Store (which almost no one buys from).
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Because they "put customers first"? That seems to be the PR that people feel had them invest in Linux, but they forget it was more of a desperation move in a time where Windows may have been trying to strongarm 3rd party game stores out. Very smart to leverage that failure of Steam Machine into a portable form factor. A bit ugly and clearly some cut corners, but the price saved on no Windows license speaks for itself.
- grug_htmx_dev 3y ago
  Mac is just another tightly closed platform, Valve could get squeezed from by Apple at any time. There's just no reason to invest in it. If you can afford a Mac, you can afford a Steam Deck.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    > just another tightly closed platform No it’s not. You can download and install anything you want from the web. Just like Windows. The Mac App Store isn’t required. Largely NO ONE uses it.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      I imagine nearly everyone who runs macOS uses the App Store. Some apps are only available on it, and even some that are also available elsewhere are more convenient to install and keep up-to-date via the store.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        You have to. Apple software is on it. But compared to the iOS store it’s kind of a ghost town. Tons of popular software isn’t in it. It’s quite normal to just download software instead of even looking to see if it’s in there. And if it is, App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed. Which prevents a lot of useful software from ever appearing in it.
        cassianoleal 3y ago
        Yep, I know. I was responding to: > Largely NO ONE uses it. Furthermore, > App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed I get that many things will not be able to function due to these restrictions, but for most software they are a good thing.
        MBCook 3y ago
        Sorry. I think I misread the tone of your comment. For a lot of things I’m happy for sandboxing. Why should random games or todo apps need more access? But the fact you can’t get good backup software like Backblaze is a problem. They need more options for levels of sandboxing, including possibly none (with heavy review).
- sph 3y ago
  They did care about Linux, which was an even smaller market that doesn't like to spend money and doesn't like closed source and DRM. Yet now everybody is singing their praises. It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    > It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple. How? It’s software like any other. There’s TONS of great software on the Mac made by 3rd parties. It can be nice. It can run fast. MS does it. Adobe does it. Indie developers do it. So why is it Apple’s fault? The story tends that gets passed around is that no one at Valve (more or less) works in it. I’m not talking about the games Steam sells. I’m talking about the Steam client. If they rewrote it in Electron (instead of whatever custom thing it uses) they could do a terrible job and it would still be faster. I’m not even asking for it to be “Mac like”, just act like showing a store page isn’t a Herculean effort.
- stetrain 3y ago
  I’ll credit both sides with the stubbornness. Apple had many years of poor integrated GPUs (arguably Intel’s fault) and even mediocre dedicated GPU options (due to a rift with NVidia). Apple also fully dropped 32-bit support, breaking a lot of older games that had been ported to Mac on Steam. Even Windows running on ARM has emulation for 32-bit x86 apps. On Valve’s side they gave very little love to the Steam client on Mac and didn’t bother to update their own games (Half Life, Portal, Counterstrike, etc) to 64-bit to keep them working on Macs. The biggest thing that has changed is now Apple ships much better GPU power even in its cheapest Macs. They still aren’t equivalent to dedicated gaming PCs but are plenty to run a huge library of casual and older games, if only there were a convenient and well-maintained path to running them.
gumballindie 3y ago
Why not switch to linux though? You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac, and battery aside, can do a lot more, is upgradeable and not locked in. Just a thought.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  > You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac Such as? And does it have Mac keyboard layout? Because it is absolutely superior to anything on non-Mac land.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    I like the asus proart studiobook. It has the option of a 3d display without glasses. Dial doesnt work though, but the specs are pretty decent and build quality is great. Battery life is shit unless you shutdown some cores and apply other scriptable settings. Keyboard feels better than any macbook i ever owned, better than the magic keyboard. Ram, hdds and wifi card are upgradeable and are of pretty good specs. Screen resolution is high, has a touchscreen, high refresh rate, usb, thunderbolt and hdmi ports, etc. But you know taste is personal and there are plenty other options.
  - franga2000 3y ago
    What's different about the mac layout? Looks fairly standard to me, even the labels seem the same, apart from the trivially remappable control/alt/command/meta/whatever keys...
- swozey 3y ago
  This is hilariously biased. This is HN, you're not talking to people who don't know what Linux is. Hell, a huge portion of us are linux engineers of various sorts. You're also in a thread literally about a linux app. Anyway. I would never, ever use Linux as a desktop environment over OSX after the experiences I've had with it over the last 20+ years. OSX GUI applications absolutely blow everything that Linux has out of the water. I don't care if we're talking KDE, i3, dwm, cinnamon. The worst part about OSX applications is they aren't cheap. Even small apps like Soundsource a https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ are usually $30+ but they are fantastic. The thought of using pipewire and all the configuration hell you have to do to it to make it like Soundsource is a complete turn off. OSX apps work. They integrate. They look great and there are a LOT of them that do pretty unique things that I haven't seen in Windows or Linux. I work on Linux 8 hours a day from OSX and about 30% of my time is using Win11 on my gaming desktop. Also, now that I'm on an m1 max there is no way in the world I'm going back to x86 as my productivity machine.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running. Stubborness is basically in the DNA of the company. They still have enough draw that they can get away with it, so I guess they were pulling off "Valves" before Valve got popular (minus the whole "open source" moniker of course. but then again, Valve didn't exactly care about FOSS per se; just a smart move for independence when you're not yet a billion dollar corportation).
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running. No, they went for running with their own silicon because Intel couldn't be arsed to provide them with actually power-efficient, performant and new CPUs and they were locked in to AMD for GPUs (because that is something Apple doesn't like). It speaks volumes about just how badly Intel (and AMD) were stuck in the past when Apple blew them to pieces with the M1 performance.

MBCook 3y ago

> if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first. They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS. The Mac is worse than an afterthought.

augusto-moura 3y ago
Valve already had Wine on Linux to work with. Although we have Wine on Mac now, it is a subpar experience. Aside from that, Vulkan on MacOS never received official support from Apple I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the two. If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple, if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor lock-in style
- MBCook 3y ago
  None of that explains why the Steam client on Mac is so terrible and has been for a very long time. Games have their own issues (you mentioned some). But the client is inexcusable.
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    What's so bad about it? It used to be dog slow and horribly buggy but recently it's been quite fine. More and more games run native as well.
adhamsalama 3y ago
Why would Valve do this for a trillion-dollar walled-garden?
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Because at least CPU-wise, the M SoCs blast a lot of the x86/64 competition to pieces. GPU is another story, although unified memory is inherently better than the current situation on x86/64.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Why release a crappy product on Mac and leave it that way for over a decade? Don’t know. But that’s what they’ve done. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t partner with someone who clearly didn’t give 2 shits about my platform. (In reality Value doesn’t need Apple. And Apple would never partner anyway, they don’t do that)
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    Valve often does things because a person employed by Valve wanted to do that thing. And then that person moves on to other things. You don't need any grander explanation for "Valve ported the Steam launcher to OS X and now barely maintains it".
- MBCook 3y ago
  Also, since I can’t edit my other reply, the Mac is not a walled garden. You can use any tool to make apps and sell them online without having to get them approved in the Mac App Store (which almost no one buys from).
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Because they "put customers first"? That seems to be the PR that people feel had them invest in Linux, but they forget it was more of a desperation move in a time where Windows may have been trying to strongarm 3rd party game stores out. Very smart to leverage that failure of Steam Machine into a portable form factor. A bit ugly and clearly some cut corners, but the price saved on no Windows license speaks for itself.
grug_htmx_dev 3y ago
Mac is just another tightly closed platform, Valve could get squeezed from by Apple at any time. There's just no reason to invest in it. If you can afford a Mac, you can afford a Steam Deck.
- MBCook 3y ago
  > just another tightly closed platform No it’s not. You can download and install anything you want from the web. Just like Windows. The Mac App Store isn’t required. Largely NO ONE uses it.
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    I imagine nearly everyone who runs macOS uses the App Store. Some apps are only available on it, and even some that are also available elsewhere are more convenient to install and keep up-to-date via the store.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      You have to. Apple software is on it. But compared to the iOS store it’s kind of a ghost town. Tons of popular software isn’t in it. It’s quite normal to just download software instead of even looking to see if it’s in there. And if it is, App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed. Which prevents a lot of useful software from ever appearing in it.
      - cassianoleal 3y ago
        Yep, I know. I was responding to: > Largely NO ONE uses it. Furthermore, > App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed I get that many things will not be able to function due to these restrictions, but for most software they are a good thing.
        MBCook 3y ago
        Sorry. I think I misread the tone of your comment. For a lot of things I’m happy for sandboxing. Why should random games or todo apps need more access? But the fact you can’t get good backup software like Backblaze is a problem. They need more options for levels of sandboxing, including possibly none (with heavy review).
sph 3y ago
They did care about Linux, which was an even smaller market that doesn't like to spend money and doesn't like closed source and DRM. Yet now everybody is singing their praises. It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple.
- MBCook 3y ago
  > It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple. How? It’s software like any other. There’s TONS of great software on the Mac made by 3rd parties. It can be nice. It can run fast. MS does it. Adobe does it. Indie developers do it. So why is it Apple’s fault? The story tends that gets passed around is that no one at Valve (more or less) works in it. I’m not talking about the games Steam sells. I’m talking about the Steam client. If they rewrote it in Electron (instead of whatever custom thing it uses) they could do a terrible job and it would still be faster. I’m not even asking for it to be “Mac like”, just act like showing a store page isn’t a Herculean effort.
stetrain 3y ago
I’ll credit both sides with the stubbornness. Apple had many years of poor integrated GPUs (arguably Intel’s fault) and even mediocre dedicated GPU options (due to a rift with NVidia). Apple also fully dropped 32-bit support, breaking a lot of older games that had been ported to Mac on Steam. Even Windows running on ARM has emulation for 32-bit x86 apps. On Valve’s side they gave very little love to the Steam client on Mac and didn’t bother to update their own games (Half Life, Portal, Counterstrike, etc) to 64-bit to keep them working on Macs. The biggest thing that has changed is now Apple ships much better GPU power even in its cheapest Macs. They still aren’t equivalent to dedicated gaming PCs but are plenty to run a huge library of casual and older games, if only there were a convenient and well-maintained path to running them.

gumballindie 3y ago

Why not switch to linux though? You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac, and battery aside, can do a lot more, is upgradeable and not locked in. Just a thought.

wiseowise 3y ago
> You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac Such as? And does it have Mac keyboard layout? Because it is absolutely superior to anything on non-Mac land.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  I like the asus proart studiobook. It has the option of a 3d display without glasses. Dial doesnt work though, but the specs are pretty decent and build quality is great. Battery life is shit unless you shutdown some cores and apply other scriptable settings. Keyboard feels better than any macbook i ever owned, better than the magic keyboard. Ram, hdds and wifi card are upgradeable and are of pretty good specs. Screen resolution is high, has a touchscreen, high refresh rate, usb, thunderbolt and hdmi ports, etc. But you know taste is personal and there are plenty other options.
- franga2000 3y ago
  What's different about the mac layout? Looks fairly standard to me, even the labels seem the same, apart from the trivially remappable control/alt/command/meta/whatever keys...
swozey 3y ago
This is hilariously biased. This is HN, you're not talking to people who don't know what Linux is. Hell, a huge portion of us are linux engineers of various sorts. You're also in a thread literally about a linux app. Anyway. I would never, ever use Linux as a desktop environment over OSX after the experiences I've had with it over the last 20+ years. OSX GUI applications absolutely blow everything that Linux has out of the water. I don't care if we're talking KDE, i3, dwm, cinnamon. The worst part about OSX applications is they aren't cheap. Even small apps like Soundsource a https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ are usually $30+ but they are fantastic. The thought of using pipewire and all the configuration hell you have to do to it to make it like Soundsource is a complete turn off. OSX apps work. They integrate. They look great and there are a LOT of them that do pretty unique things that I haven't seen in Windows or Linux. I work on Linux 8 hours a day from OSX and about 30% of my time is using Win11 on my gaming desktop. Also, now that I'm on an m1 max there is no way in the world I'm going back to x86 as my productivity machine.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running. Stubborness is basically in the DNA of the company. They still have enough draw that they can get away with it, so I guess they were pulling off "Valves" before Valve got popular (minus the whole "open source" moniker of course. but then again, Valve didn't exactly care about FOSS per se; just a smart move for independence when you're not yet a billion dollar corportation).

mschuster91 3y ago
> I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running. No, they went for running with their own silicon because Intel couldn't be arsed to provide them with actually power-efficient, performant and new CPUs and they were locked in to AMD for GPUs (because that is something Apple doesn't like). It speaks volumes about just how badly Intel (and AMD) were stuck in the past when Apple blew them to pieces with the M1 performance.