9 ms·

Linux overtakes Mac as Steam's second-most used OS, thanks to the Steam Deck

263 points by neverminder 3y ago

clhodapp 3y ago
I use Proton and will remain a huge fan of Valve as long as they are funding most of the work that makes it feasible for me to run Linux on all my machines. However, I think that this speaks more to the degree to which Apple have put the torch to Mac gaming than it does to the size of Linux gaming.
- jwells89 3y ago
  If Apple could someone make Macs relevant for gaming again it'd be interesting, but I'm not sure what the roadmap to that result looks like. Implementing Vulkan support would likely help, but PC games are still chiefly written with DirectX, which is a big part of why Proton is necessary. Perhaps the key is for them to work closely with Valve to make Proton work well on macOS, which would also neatly deal with the 32-bit issue because WINE/CrossOver on macOS handles 32-bit Windows binaries just fine despite macOS having dropped support for 32-bit Mac binaries ages ago. This however seems unlikely because even setting aside the issue of how Apple might see doing this as pushing users to a competing marketplace, it also cedes some amount of the Mac's functionality and thus marketability to a third party which Apple has never been keen on.
  - zapzupnz 3y ago
    > Perhaps the key is for them to work closely with Valve to make Proton work well on macOS Apple are doing something very similar already with their Game Porting Kit framework. It supports DX12 games translated to Metal and runs very well. This effort only become public this year, though, so the fruits of that labour are yet to be borne.
    - ohgodplsno 3y ago
      You are not allowed to release and sell a game using the Game Porting Kit. Apple will strike you down for that. It's only here to help developers port their games to use Metal, which is peak Apple: force everyone to use your unused, non standard API to support a few thousand customers. But then again, let's face the truth: Apple doesn't care about having Counter Strike on your Macbook. They make billions doing absolutely fuck all and taking 30% of all microtransactions on all App Store games.
  - Analemma_ 3y ago
    > but I'm not sure what the roadmap to that result looks like. The only real impediment is that they need to care. The one thing in common across all successful gaming platforms is that the platform owner cares a lot and works closely with game devs to make things work: - Microsoft/Nvidia/AMD ship game-specific patches and optimizations for Windows games - console makers work closely with third-party devs and give advice, feedback, certification, etc. - Valve specifically has put tons of effort into SteamOS and certifies individual games as ready/not ready for the Steam Deck All it takes is a platform owner who cares, and cares on the level of interventions for particular games, but this is totally foreign to Apple's DNA (both in general, and for games in particular). They'd need a huge culture shift.
aidenn0 3y ago
Biggest issue with targeting "Linux" is revealed in the Linux OS breakdown. If you throw out the SteamOS, you are left with about 45% of the Linux users in the "Other" category (i.e. not in the 6 most popular linux distributions), compared to about 14% for Arch and Ubuntu. There's plenty to disagree with RMS on, but he's absolutely right that Linux is not an OS; it's a kernel.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Linux Distros, these days especially, are a paint of coat and tire size difference between each other. You make it sound like someone running Fedora (a significant slice of those in the "Other" category) is having a drastically different experience to those using Manjaro, Ubuntu and Pop_OS!.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    If that were the case then they could all pool together their documentation and help guides. But I'm guessing the reason they don't is because there are some non-superficial differences.
    - dijit 3y ago
      year-by-year they are doing exactly this. I hear more often than not ubuntu users using the arch wiki for example because despite the package manager, lots of things are similar.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      No, the differences are purely superficial. Which is why they don't pool together. Your argument is like saying Lutherans and Episcopalians aren't both Protestants because they disagree on the meaning of the trinity, despite agreeing on 99% else. Most Linux guides do work on all distros, as long as you're willing to adapt for package management solutions and Desktop Environments (when applicable).
      - conradev 3y ago
simion314 3y ago
Hopefully new games will prioritize Linux/SteamOS over Mac, I am still checking games and see them only supporting Win/Mac and Proton rating is not perfect and could at any time fail if game updates.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Likewise, I keep checking games and seeing only Win and Mac listed, and I just don't get it. Maybe the change will take a little while to impact?
  - simion314 3y ago
    I hope, but I would not bet on it. Unity supports Linux for a long time and still I see some Unity games are not published for Linux but published for Mac, not sure if why, maybe because some people in the team are using Mac and are fine with testing the Mac builds but don't care about Linux. I am OK with Proton official support, then we know that we get support for breaking bugs.
_m8fo 3y ago
Interesting that the quest 2 wins for Vr headsets even though it’s stand alone. Unsurprisingly nvidia dominates with gpus.
- jwells89 3y ago
  > Interesting that the quest 2 wins for Vr headsets even though it’s stand alone. The reason for this is pretty clear, there's nothing as good as the Quest 2 in the PC VR headset market anywhere near the Quest 2's price, and even if you're willing to fork out more the options are either long on the tooth or mediocre for the price. It's why I use one as a PC headset.
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    Yep. I've been playing War Thunder simulator battles in VR for the past few weeks, and have gotten serious enough about it that I've upgraded my PC and dropped ~$400 on a HOTAS setup. I'm using my Quest 2 because there's really no other viable options. The resolution isn't high enough to be "good", but it's simply the best available at the moment. I'm anxiously awaiting the Quest 3 and will buy it at release. There are some headsets out there now with higher resolution, but they're very expensive, hard to actually find for sale, from a small/unknown manufacturer, or all of the above.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    HP Reverb G2 >> Quest 2.
whalesalad 3y ago
Is it possible to install Steam w/o enabling 32-bit architectures yet?
- freedomben 3y ago
  I've done it on Fedora, though it complains on every startup that it can't find the 32-bit libs, so it's probably not sanctioned.
- nani8ot 3y ago
  Yes and no, by installing Steam as flatpak. The Steam Linux (and Windows) clients still require 32-bit, but with flatpak the rest of the system doesn't have them. Edit: freedomben commented that Steam works but complains on Fedora w/o 32-bit libraries. So it might work until a game actually needs them. And macOS has a 64-bit-only Steam client, altough they don't support any 32-bit games anyway.
_cenw 3y ago
If you want to know how neglected Steam on macOS is... it's an Intel binary (now using 100% CEF for its UI) and about 2/3 of the catalog doesn't work because they targeted x86 (not-_64). If you're looking for native Apple Silicon games it gets even more grim. I was hoping for that trend to reverse with game porting toolkit, but it doesn't seem like that's happening. Whoever pushes for Gaming at Apple doesn't seem to have massive internal support. Metal VR died almost as soon as it released and somehow they thought making Game Porting Toolkit license incompatible with Wine/Proton/CrossOver was a great move, because all you need to convince a game developer to invest in a dead (to your audience) platform that will likely deprecate your API in a year or two is a proof of concept of how well it can run.
- dee-bee 3y ago
  I agree that gaming on mac is fairly grim, but I've been quite happy playing games on my 13" M1 macbook (air i think?). This excludes most AAA games, but I've certainly enjoyed Victoria 3 (and other paradox games). They don't seem to run much slower than on intel (which, granted, is typically worse than through wine or windows). Baldurs Gate 3 should be on it soon, I think. The mac market itself should shift pretty rapidly. Edit: factorio and oxygen not included have both been pretty solid, too. I think factorio is even native.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Well, yes, at the end of the day Macs are still general purpose computers and despite all the hoops Apple puts in place that developers have to jump through, you can still release programs - including games - for them. So they do have and - unless Apple really screws up things somewhere - will always have games. But what you're writing is basically what Linux gamers were writing for many years - even before Valve started focusing on it too.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - alpaca128 3y ago
esalman 3y ago
We did a lot of online lan during the pandemic. One guy in our party was a staunch Apple enthusiast/fanboy and insisted on his mac for lan. So most of our time was spent on finding Mac compatible games on steam, trying them out (and basically see what breaks), and piling insult on him. Truth be told we got more pleasure from cussing at the Apple guy than actually playing any game.
- robbie-c 3y ago
  My fiancee and I play a few games together with me on my Silicon mac, and her on my Windows gaming machine. Some games that have worked well: Divinity 2, Civ 6, Stellaris, Factorio.
  - mjevans 3y ago
    Divinity 2 seems to need Proton, probably would help to use the not-supported community build that includes the kitchen sink video codecs... https://www.protondb.com/app/219780 https://www.protondb.com/app/219780 Civ 6, Stellaris, and Factorio I own copies / licenses of and all three have native builds for Linux so I'd be _amazed_ if they did not also have native builds for OSX too (or failing that, at least the Linux builds should be usable).
shmerl 3y ago
Makes sense. In contrast, macOS doesn't make any sense for gaming.
pugio 3y ago
I'm hoping that the Apple Game Porting Toolkit signals a shift to more games support. Thankfully, the Apple Silicon machines are powerful enough to support many modern games. I'm currently (and happily) playing Baldur's Gate 3 using Wineskin on my M1 MBP with no problems. So far no bugs, and multiplayer with PC users works great.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I'm so curious to know how hard it would be to make another Linux deck. Back when Steam was trying to make consoles, they were recruiting others to make the hardware. I'm not sure how available software was then, how open options were then. But I so want to know it compares to today. It sounded like the whole Deck UI was fairly custom at start? And there has to be a decent bit of custom integration, beyond the shell itself. Tweaks to the base Arch OS & it's packages. Supposedly the Big Picture Mode in Steam has gotten a decent overhaul that makes it more Deck like, but I haven't tried it nor a Deck yet! I hope someone else out there has the courage to try a Linux gaming deck!
gorkish 3y ago
Linux overtakes Mac as Steam's second-most used OS, thanks to Apple Fixed headline
- davely 3y ago
  Apple isn’t doing itself any favors, but the status quo has been the same for years now. I consider myself a big old Apple fan boy, have various flavors of Mac machines around the house, etc. But my Steam Deck has been an absolute revelation. Makes it so easy to pick up games really quick, game in random places, and use my existing library of games whenever I want. I also have a gaming PC… which I hardly boot up anymore. The Steam Deck is easily my favorite consumer electronics device, in years. Probably since the original iPhone came out. The delta between MacOS gaming market share and Linux gaming market share on Steam is exclusively due to the Steam Deck.
  - gorkish 3y ago
    If you are saying that Steam Decks comprise nearly the entirety of Steam on Linux usage then I fully agree with you; however the number of macs in the market is so far and away larger than the number of steam decks, that the two platforms ordinarily shouldn't even be comparable. With every new release of hardware or software that Apple makes, fewer and fewer of the existing game library on MacOS (Steam or otherwise) continue to work; it's absolutely absurd. You know you can't even play Bejeweled on a modern mac, right? How am I supposed to explain that to a widow with Alzehimers who just wants to keep playing the games she remembers? (This actually happened. I had to fucking wine-bottle the windows version myself) Of 502 games in my Steam library only 163 will run on an Apple Silicon mac. Big kudos to the game authors who even bother anymore.
ragle 3y ago
I want to share a personal anecdote, as I recently spent quite a bit of time deciding whether or not to leave Mac OS for linux (Manjaro) this year for my personal computing needs - primarily because of gaming. Ultimately, I did make the switch. Several years back, Apple broke most of my steam library with Catalina. I wasn't a serious gamer, but I had a lot of nostalgic games from the aughts and early 2010s that ran great (pre-Catalina) on my top-of-the-line mid-2015 retina MBP. I finally retired that machine this year and bought a higher-end gaming pc for less than half of what it would cost me to get a less-than-the-best Apple Silicon MBP. Yeah, it's heavy. Battery life isn't great. But my phone has replaced so much of my mobile computing needs that I don't really need to take a laptop with me when I'm traveling unless it's for work, in which case I'll have my company-issued machine with me anyway. I never thought I'd leave MacOS for Linux - but I recently got back into gaming and basically wasn't willing to spend $4k+ on a machine I couldn't game on when all of my personal project needs, etc. can be attended to on a cheaper gaming laptop. The fact that Apple Silicon is an absolute beast, graphically, made it all worse somehow. Like having a Ferrari in your garage that you aren't allowed to drive - only pay for and look at. Am I Apple's target demographic? Apart from being a developer - probably not. I don't do a lot of multimedia stuff (at least, I don't do anything that isn't adequately served by a PC with a solid GPU). Because I grew up on linux I'm right at home there with all of my non-work dev / geek / fun stuff and that probably makes me an outlier. Apple's success clearly speaks for their business savvy - and, there's now a number of chinks in my (previously 100%) Apple loyalty across my wide array of gadgetry (several Apple TVs and one each for me and my wife of: laptop, ipad, iphone, watch, airpods). After a disappointing battery experience with my airpods - I replaced them with some excellent-sounding soundcore buds. My apple watch needs to be replaced soon and I'll probably get a Garmin (again - battery life and consistent failure to capture VO2 max on outdoor runs, other frustrations). I enjoy VR gaming and plan to upgrade from a quest 2 to a quest 3 instead of buying a vision pro. What's next to go in my Apple line-up? I don't know but I've become much more open to shopping around for non-Apple tech than I was in, say, 2016 when it seemed to me that nothing else could compete with Apple. I wonder how true this is for Apple's "geek core" of tech professionals, and how much of it is just my unique little anecdote? And, in any case - does Apple care? They've cornered the market for both the technical-artistic and "luxury" class. Plenty of meat on those bones without worrying about the geeky whims of the pesky few that are open to (and capable of) something like abandoning Mac OS for Linux. Still, it was sad to give up my Mac OS personal computing environment. I love Apple - but for what I care about, Apple just doesn't seem to love me. We'll always have our iOS time together I guess, for now anyway.

263 points by neverminder 3y ago

I use Proton and will remain a huge fan of Valve as long as they are funding most of the work that makes it feasible for me to run Linux on all my machines. However, I think that this speaks more to the degree to which Apple have put the torch to Mac gaming than it does to the size of Linux gaming.

jwells89 3y ago
If Apple could someone make Macs relevant for gaming again it'd be interesting, but I'm not sure what the roadmap to that result looks like. Implementing Vulkan support would likely help, but PC games are still chiefly written with DirectX, which is a big part of why Proton is necessary. Perhaps the key is for them to work closely with Valve to make Proton work well on macOS, which would also neatly deal with the 32-bit issue because WINE/CrossOver on macOS handles 32-bit Windows binaries just fine despite macOS having dropped support for 32-bit Mac binaries ages ago. This however seems unlikely because even setting aside the issue of how Apple might see doing this as pushing users to a competing marketplace, it also cedes some amount of the Mac's functionality and thus marketability to a third party which Apple has never been keen on.
- zapzupnz 3y ago
  > Perhaps the key is for them to work closely with Valve to make Proton work well on macOS Apple are doing something very similar already with their Game Porting Kit framework. It supports DX12 games translated to Metal and runs very well. This effort only become public this year, though, so the fruits of that labour are yet to be borne.
  - ohgodplsno 3y ago
    You are not allowed to release and sell a game using the Game Porting Kit. Apple will strike you down for that. It's only here to help developers port their games to use Metal, which is peak Apple: force everyone to use your unused, non standard API to support a few thousand customers. But then again, let's face the truth: Apple doesn't care about having Counter Strike on your Macbook. They make billions doing absolutely fuck all and taking 30% of all microtransactions on all App Store games.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  > but I'm not sure what the roadmap to that result looks like. The only real impediment is that they need to care. The one thing in common across all successful gaming platforms is that the platform owner cares a lot and works closely with game devs to make things work: - Microsoft/Nvidia/AMD ship game-specific patches and optimizations for Windows games - console makers work closely with third-party devs and give advice, feedback, certification, etc. - Valve specifically has put tons of effort into SteamOS and certifies individual games as ready/not ready for the Steam Deck All it takes is a platform owner who cares, and cares on the level of interventions for particular games, but this is totally foreign to Apple's DNA (both in general, and for games in particular). They'd need a huge culture shift.

aidenn0 3y ago

Biggest issue with targeting "Linux" is revealed in the Linux OS breakdown. If you throw out the SteamOS, you are left with about 45% of the Linux users in the "Other" category (i.e. not in the 6 most popular linux distributions), compared to about 14% for Arch and Ubuntu. There's plenty to disagree with RMS on, but he's absolutely right that Linux is not an OS; it's a kernel.

deaddodo 3y ago
Linux Distros, these days especially, are a paint of coat and tire size difference between each other. You make it sound like someone running Fedora (a significant slice of those in the "Other" category) is having a drastically different experience to those using Manjaro, Ubuntu and Pop_OS!.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  If that were the case then they could all pool together their documentation and help guides. But I'm guessing the reason they don't is because there are some non-superficial differences.
  - dijit 3y ago
    year-by-year they are doing exactly this. I hear more often than not ubuntu users using the arch wiki for example because despite the package manager, lots of things are similar.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    No, the differences are purely superficial. Which is why they don't pool together. Your argument is like saying Lutherans and Episcopalians aren't both Protestants because they disagree on the meaning of the trinity, despite agreeing on 99% else. Most Linux guides do work on all distros, as long as you're willing to adapt for package management solutions and Desktop Environments (when applicable).
    - conradev 3y ago

simion314 3y ago

Hopefully new games will prioritize Linux/SteamOS over Mac, I am still checking games and see them only supporting Win/Mac and Proton rating is not perfect and could at any time fail if game updates.

freedomben 3y ago
Likewise, I keep checking games and seeing only Win and Mac listed, and I just don't get it. Maybe the change will take a little while to impact?
- simion314 3y ago
  I hope, but I would not bet on it. Unity supports Linux for a long time and still I see some Unity games are not published for Linux but published for Mac, not sure if why, maybe because some people in the team are using Mac and are fine with testing the Mac builds but don't care about Linux. I am OK with Proton official support, then we know that we get support for breaking bugs.

_m8fo 3y ago

Interesting that the quest 2 wins for Vr headsets even though it’s stand alone. Unsurprisingly nvidia dominates with gpus.

jwells89 3y ago
> Interesting that the quest 2 wins for Vr headsets even though it’s stand alone. The reason for this is pretty clear, there's nothing as good as the Quest 2 in the PC VR headset market anywhere near the Quest 2's price, and even if you're willing to fork out more the options are either long on the tooth or mediocre for the price. It's why I use one as a PC headset.
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  Yep. I've been playing War Thunder simulator battles in VR for the past few weeks, and have gotten serious enough about it that I've upgraded my PC and dropped ~$400 on a HOTAS setup. I'm using my Quest 2 because there's really no other viable options. The resolution isn't high enough to be "good", but it's simply the best available at the moment. I'm anxiously awaiting the Quest 3 and will buy it at release. There are some headsets out there now with higher resolution, but they're very expensive, hard to actually find for sale, from a small/unknown manufacturer, or all of the above.
- treprinum 3y ago
  HP Reverb G2 >> Quest 2.

whalesalad 3y ago

Is it possible to install Steam w/o enabling 32-bit architectures yet?

freedomben 3y ago
I've done it on Fedora, though it complains on every startup that it can't find the 32-bit libs, so it's probably not sanctioned.
nani8ot 3y ago
Yes and no, by installing Steam as flatpak. The Steam Linux (and Windows) clients still require 32-bit, but with flatpak the rest of the system doesn't have them. Edit: freedomben commented that Steam works but complains on Fedora w/o 32-bit libraries. So it might work until a game actually needs them. And macOS has a 64-bit-only Steam client, altough they don't support any 32-bit games anyway.

_cenw 3y ago

If you want to know how neglected Steam on macOS is... it's an Intel binary (now using 100% CEF for its UI) and about 2/3 of the catalog doesn't work because they targeted x86 (not-_64). If you're looking for native Apple Silicon games it gets even more grim. I was hoping for that trend to reverse with game porting toolkit, but it doesn't seem like that's happening. Whoever pushes for Gaming at Apple doesn't seem to have massive internal support. Metal VR died almost as soon as it released and somehow they thought making Game Porting Toolkit license incompatible with Wine/Proton/CrossOver was a great move, because all you need to convince a game developer to invest in a dead (to your audience) platform that will likely deprecate your API in a year or two is a proof of concept of how well it can run.

dee-bee 3y ago
I agree that gaming on mac is fairly grim, but I've been quite happy playing games on my 13" M1 macbook (air i think?). This excludes most AAA games, but I've certainly enjoyed Victoria 3 (and other paradox games). They don't seem to run much slower than on intel (which, granted, is typically worse than through wine or windows). Baldurs Gate 3 should be on it soon, I think. The mac market itself should shift pretty rapidly. Edit: factorio and oxygen not included have both been pretty solid, too. I think factorio is even native.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Well, yes, at the end of the day Macs are still general purpose computers and despite all the hoops Apple puts in place that developers have to jump through, you can still release programs - including games - for them. So they do have and - unless Apple really screws up things somewhere - will always have games. But what you're writing is basically what Linux gamers were writing for many years - even before Valve started focusing on it too.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- alpaca128 3y ago

esalman 3y ago

We did a lot of online lan during the pandemic. One guy in our party was a staunch Apple enthusiast/fanboy and insisted on his mac for lan. So most of our time was spent on finding Mac compatible games on steam, trying them out (and basically see what breaks), and piling insult on him. Truth be told we got more pleasure from cussing at the Apple guy than actually playing any game.

robbie-c 3y ago
My fiancee and I play a few games together with me on my Silicon mac, and her on my Windows gaming machine. Some games that have worked well: Divinity 2, Civ 6, Stellaris, Factorio.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Divinity 2 seems to need Proton, probably would help to use the not-supported community build that includes the kitchen sink video codecs... https://www.protondb.com/app/219780 https://www.protondb.com/app/219780 Civ 6, Stellaris, and Factorio I own copies / licenses of and all three have native builds for Linux so I'd be _amazed_ if they did not also have native builds for OSX too (or failing that, at least the Linux builds should be usable).

shmerl 3y ago

Makes sense. In contrast, macOS doesn't make any sense for gaming.

pugio 3y ago

I'm hoping that the Apple Game Porting Toolkit signals a shift to more games support. Thankfully, the Apple Silicon machines are powerful enough to support many modern games. I'm currently (and happily) playing Baldur's Gate 3 using Wineskin on my M1 MBP with no problems. So far no bugs, and multiplayer with PC users works great.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I'm so curious to know how hard it would be to make another Linux deck. Back when Steam was trying to make consoles, they were recruiting others to make the hardware. I'm not sure how available software was then, how open options were then. But I so want to know it compares to today. It sounded like the whole Deck UI was fairly custom at start? And there has to be a decent bit of custom integration, beyond the shell itself. Tweaks to the base Arch OS & it's packages. Supposedly the Big Picture Mode in Steam has gotten a decent overhaul that makes it more Deck like, but I haven't tried it nor a Deck yet! I hope someone else out there has the courage to try a Linux gaming deck!

gorkish 3y ago

Linux overtakes Mac as Steam's second-most used OS, thanks to Apple Fixed headline

davely 3y ago
Apple isn’t doing itself any favors, but the status quo has been the same for years now. I consider myself a big old Apple fan boy, have various flavors of Mac machines around the house, etc. But my Steam Deck has been an absolute revelation. Makes it so easy to pick up games really quick, game in random places, and use my existing library of games whenever I want. I also have a gaming PC… which I hardly boot up anymore. The Steam Deck is easily my favorite consumer electronics device, in years. Probably since the original iPhone came out. The delta between MacOS gaming market share and Linux gaming market share on Steam is exclusively due to the Steam Deck.
- gorkish 3y ago
  If you are saying that Steam Decks comprise nearly the entirety of Steam on Linux usage then I fully agree with you; however the number of macs in the market is so far and away larger than the number of steam decks, that the two platforms ordinarily shouldn't even be comparable. With every new release of hardware or software that Apple makes, fewer and fewer of the existing game library on MacOS (Steam or otherwise) continue to work; it's absolutely absurd. You know you can't even play Bejeweled on a modern mac, right? How am I supposed to explain that to a widow with Alzehimers who just wants to keep playing the games she remembers? (This actually happened. I had to fucking wine-bottle the windows version myself) Of 502 games in my Steam library only 163 will run on an Apple Silicon mac. Big kudos to the game authors who even bother anymore.

ragle 3y ago

I want to share a personal anecdote, as I recently spent quite a bit of time deciding whether or not to leave Mac OS for linux (Manjaro) this year for my personal computing needs - primarily because of gaming. Ultimately, I did make the switch. Several years back, Apple broke most of my steam library with Catalina. I wasn't a serious gamer, but I had a lot of nostalgic games from the aughts and early 2010s that ran great (pre-Catalina) on my top-of-the-line mid-2015 retina MBP. I finally retired that machine this year and bought a higher-end gaming pc for less than half of what it would cost me to get a less-than-the-best Apple Silicon MBP. Yeah, it's heavy. Battery life isn't great. But my phone has replaced so much of my mobile computing needs that I don't really need to take a laptop with me when I'm traveling unless it's for work, in which case I'll have my company-issued machine with me anyway. I never thought I'd leave MacOS for Linux - but I recently got back into gaming and basically wasn't willing to spend $4k+ on a machine I couldn't game on when all of my personal project needs, etc. can be attended to on a cheaper gaming laptop. The fact that Apple Silicon is an absolute beast, graphically, made it all worse somehow. Like having a Ferrari in your garage that you aren't allowed to drive - only pay for and look at. Am I Apple's target demographic? Apart from being a developer - probably not. I don't do a lot of multimedia stuff (at least, I don't do anything that isn't adequately served by a PC with a solid GPU). Because I grew up on linux I'm right at home there with all of my non-work dev / geek / fun stuff and that probably makes me an outlier. Apple's success clearly speaks for their business savvy - and, there's now a number of chinks in my (previously 100%) Apple loyalty across my wide array of gadgetry (several Apple TVs and one each for me and my wife of: laptop, ipad, iphone, watch, airpods). After a disappointing battery experience with my airpods - I replaced them with some excellent-sounding soundcore buds. My apple watch needs to be replaced soon and I'll probably get a Garmin (again - battery life and consistent failure to capture VO2 max on outdoor runs, other frustrations). I enjoy VR gaming and plan to upgrade from a quest 2 to a quest 3 instead of buying a vision pro. What's next to go in my Apple line-up? I don't know but I've become much more open to shopping around for non-Apple tech than I was in, say, 2016 when it seemed to me that nothing else could compete with Apple. I wonder how true this is for Apple's "geek core" of tech professionals, and how much of it is just my unique little anecdote? And, in any case - does Apple care? They've cornered the market for both the technical-artistic and "luxury" class. Plenty of meat on those bones without worrying about the geeky whims of the pesky few that are open to (and capable of) something like abandoning Mac OS for Linux. Still, it was sad to give up my Mac OS personal computing environment. I love Apple - but for what I care about, Apple just doesn't seem to love me. We'll always have our iOS time together I guess, for now anyway.