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I have a cheap samsung laptop with an intel iris gpu. Not a proper gaming laptop. This was an emergency replacement for a broken macbook a few years ago. It cam
by jillesvangurp 3y ago
I have a cheap samsung laptop with an intel iris gpu. Not a proper gaming laptop. This was an emergency replacement for a broken macbook a few years ago. It came with windows and I booted it once to download a manjaro image and put it on a usb stick. Long story short, I'm back on a mac for work and the laptop is now used for some light gaming. Steam installation on Manjaro was easy. It's basically arch linux and that's the same OS that the Steam Deck is using under the hood. It works great. I'm actually considering getting something a bit beefier at some point. Possibly with some VR goggles. I'm pretty happy with Linux, and not having to deal with Windows is very nice.
The nice thing with lots of users now doing this is that it is becoming important for game developers to ensure their stuff is supported on Linux as well. That used to be something that few developers cared about but this is actually turning into a large enough chunk of users that most of them will probably want to make sure their stuff works. And the good news is that it is not that hard. It mostly just boils down to testing and fixing bugs. There's no good reason for them to not do that. Even if it's just 1 or 2 percent of users, that represents some serious revenue for some of these games.
Apple apparently is paying attention because they launched their game porting toolkit over the summer. Which, despite the name, is actually quite similar to Proton. Early days but it looks like MS is losing their monopoly on PC gaming. I run X-plane 12 on my M1 macbook occasionally. It's a pretty capable machine. It would be interesting to see if Valve is planning something for Macs now. It's a nice market. Lots of wealthy users that think nothing of spending a few dollars in the app store.
- jzombie 3y agoInteresting you mentioned using X-plane 12 on your M1. I had considered doing the same. Currently play MS Flight Simulator sometimes via XBox Cloud Gaming, over a VPN to Nicaragua. It isn't bad, but X-plane seems like it could be better for me.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoGive it a try. The demo version runs for a few minutes before it forces you to restart it. Long enough to figure out if it will run well for you.
- wharvle 3y agoI remember being pleasantly surprised at how much gaming mileage I could get out of my 2014 MacBook Pro with Intel graphics. A huge proportion of Unity-engine games, for one thing, ran just fine, some even at high graphics (which, they still looked kinda crappy, but still). No contemporary AAA gaming possible, but plenty of big games worked great (Minecraft!) And the M-series chips are on a whole other level than those were. I wish... any amount of my gaming library could run on them.
- xcv123 3y agoTry Crossover. https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover You can install x64 Windows Steam on that and run at least some of your games without issues.