2 ms·

I mean I owned a Mac back then, I remember pretty fondly that pre-Catalina MacOS was a fairly well-targeted platform. OpenGL was working for them; you could pla

I mean I owned a Mac back then, I remember pretty fondly that pre-Catalina MacOS was a fairly well-targeted platform. OpenGL was working for them; you could play first-person shooters, online games with fancy graphics, the kit and kaboodle. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of functional cross-platform software back when Apple commit to maintaining common APIs. You cannot deny that an entire ecosystem of software that was once cross-platform had to now choose sides, if they would support Metal or OpenGL. I watched it collapse with a single system update. > Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. My brother in Christ, the "reality of the state of gaming" is that Mac owners are buying Steam Decks just to access the games Apple tries to kneecap. Vulkan fixed it, and Valve commoditized Apple's compliment. I don't want things to be this way. I think Mac owners should have easy access to the games they want to play, but Apple insisted otherwise for so long and refused to ever admit that they were wasting their time. It's part of the reason I got rid of my Mac so I could daily-drive Linux; they were wrong, and other platforms were right.

dagmx 2y ago
Go back and see how many of those games were running Cider though. The switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. The number of games that targeted OpenGL was ALSO shockingly low. This is something that OSS fans do not want to reconcile: Open source graphics APIs have LONG lost out to proprietary graphics APIs in gaming. OpenGL had a very small base in games, Vulkan is even smaller. and again, you went exactly back to where I knew you would and pre-empted it because it's the obvious playbook of answers. Vulkan didn't fix gaming on Linux. Proton did. And again, you ignore the key part of the sentence: NATIVE Linux has fewer *native* AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. The SteamDeck is a product targeted at gamers that provided a new value proposition: AAA gaming on the go. Which further reinforces my point that API is irrelevant to the discussion, its about demographic. Apple has a strong gaming demographic on the mobile side (with metal no less). The steam deck didn't introduce new Vulkan/Proton capabilities. Why was Linux gaming stagnant before it? Doesn't that exactly reinforce that its the form factor proposition that made it skyrocket?
- talldayo 2y ago
  > switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. It did. If you want to parade around how cool Cider is, it doesn't make much sense to venerate the update that killed it. > Linux has fewer native AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. Imagine all the Steam Deck users that are pissed because they can't play Resident Evil 8 and Tomb Raider natively! They must be super upset, and envious of Apple's superior native version. Surely. Hey, here's a magic question for you; which do you think will get supported longer, a DirectX title running on Proton or an Apple-native title running on Apple software. Do you trust Apple to keep supporting your game as long as Proton would keep supporting it?
  - christkv 2y ago
    Considering backward compatibility on ios my bet is on proton for sure.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  Why do you have tunnel vision on "native". It's a pretty meaningless distinction at this point. No steam deck users cares that all the games they are playing aren't "native".
  - jakogut 2y ago
    Precisely. Modern games incorporate all manner of middleware to add functionality. Compression, video codecs, shading, ray tracing, physics, animation, anti-cheat. What's one more piece of software in the pile to abstract away platform-specific interfaces?
    - anthk 2y ago
      Also Wine it's just a Win32 subsystem for Unix with a PE loader. Also, a hint: on NT Systems, Win32 it's another subsystem on top of the NT kernel. I'm pretty sure Windows 95/98 software under 2000/XP doesn't run 'directly' in the same they did under their original OSes.
- 2y ago

dagmx 2y ago

Go back and see how many of those games were running Cider though. The switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. The number of games that targeted OpenGL was ALSO shockingly low. This is something that OSS fans do not want to reconcile: Open source graphics APIs have LONG lost out to proprietary graphics APIs in gaming. OpenGL had a very small base in games, Vulkan is even smaller. and again, you went exactly back to where I knew you would and pre-empted it because it's the obvious playbook of answers. Vulkan didn't fix gaming on Linux. Proton did. And again, you ignore the key part of the sentence: NATIVE Linux has fewer *native* AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. The SteamDeck is a product targeted at gamers that provided a new value proposition: AAA gaming on the go. Which further reinforces my point that API is irrelevant to the discussion, its about demographic. Apple has a strong gaming demographic on the mobile side (with metal no less). The steam deck didn't introduce new Vulkan/Proton capabilities. Why was Linux gaming stagnant before it? Doesn't that exactly reinforce that its the form factor proposition that made it skyrocket?

talldayo 2y ago
> switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. It did. If you want to parade around how cool Cider is, it doesn't make much sense to venerate the update that killed it. > Linux has fewer native AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. Imagine all the Steam Deck users that are pissed because they can't play Resident Evil 8 and Tomb Raider natively! They must be super upset, and envious of Apple's superior native version. Surely. Hey, here's a magic question for you; which do you think will get supported longer, a DirectX title running on Proton or an Apple-native title running on Apple software. Do you trust Apple to keep supporting your game as long as Proton would keep supporting it?
- christkv 2y ago
  Considering backward compatibility on ios my bet is on proton for sure.
rowanG077 2y ago
Why do you have tunnel vision on "native". It's a pretty meaningless distinction at this point. No steam deck users cares that all the games they are playing aren't "native".
- jakogut 2y ago
  Precisely. Modern games incorporate all manner of middleware to add functionality. Compression, video codecs, shading, ray tracing, physics, animation, anti-cheat. What's one more piece of software in the pile to abstract away platform-specific interfaces?
  - anthk 2y ago
    Also Wine it's just a Win32 subsystem for Unix with a PE loader. Also, a hint: on NT Systems, Win32 it's another subsystem on top of the NT kernel. I'm pretty sure Windows 95/98 software under 2000/XP doesn't run 'directly' in the same they did under their original OSes.
2y ago