I’m reading a bit of a tongue-in-cheek teasing tone in that language choice personally
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Silicon Macs Running Linux Receive Major Gaming Update
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Maybe compared to when you could Bootcamp, but the game porting toolkit has seen loads of decent AAA games running on Apple Silicon machines. Have a look at Andrew Tsai's YT channel, he does a lot of content on the various ways to play games on an Apple Silicon Mac.I really want some cool gaming brought to the Mac. It seems to be going backwards. All that there is these days is Nintendo style kiddy games in my opinion.makes me sad
There’s not much progress that can be made if non-Device mappings over Thunderbolt aren’t supported, though. And, that’s at the hardware level. If Apple doesn’t make the hardware capable of it, then performance won’t be anything worth even getting an eGPU case for.
Let's be real here... Obviously, anyone can use an old, "no longer supported" computer for as long as they can physically keep it operational. I'm part of a group, online, of people who are still writing new apps for the Radio Shack Color Computers 1,2, and 3 -- which have been out of production since around 1991. (There are people with hardware modifications for them so you can use more modern monitors instead a color TV as the display.)
The real issue is that Apple will draw the line someplace where MacOS releases no longer install on older systems. So your Mac is no longer able to run Apple's current vision of what its operating system is supposed to be. That matters when they do things like they've done in the past, dropping all 32-bit application support.
Right, Apple’s happy to say “Looking for Windows? Well, shucks seems to me there’s a LOT of those out there.” or “Need a Linux machine? Well I’ll be, look at ALLLL those different Linux machines out there. Seems like the picking’s pretty good!”
If there’s enough people that want a feature Apple doesn’t provide, there’s likely enough of them to work together to get it done. If there’s NOT enough people that want a feature Apple doesn’t provide, then it’s “Have you looked at what all these non-Apple companies are offering?”
Don't forget Apple expended time, energy, and resources to support Windows on its Intel x86 Macs... via bootcamp. It even had drivers for the various hardware components like the bluetooth/wifi radios, GPUs, trackpads, etc.
So when you look at the situation with that historical context, where Apple used to provide more support for installing windows etc., it is a bit sad that they no longer do so on Apple Silicon.
Finally, Apple supports Metal but not other industry standard graphics libraries like OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. But games are made with the industry standards in mind. Apple seems to care a bit more about gaming on the Mac, with its porting toolkit, but I'd argue that natively supporting the Vulkan/OpenGL on Apple Silicon would have made it easier for developers to bring certain games over to Mac. I hope Apple continues to invest resources and development, to make gaming on the Macintosh possible.
Might be circumventable within the IOMMU driver, or with an additional transport layer. People wont be able to really start exploring those options until thunderbolt itself is supported though
AFAICT the limitation is likely forced by Microsoft having their exclusivity agreement with qualcomm for windows on arm, if/when that expires I wouldnt be surprised to see Apple support bootcamp on AS
There is no way a 2009 Mini would be able to run Ventura. I have a 2014 Mac Mini with an SSD running Big Sur and it chugs so bad on Mac OS I just stopped using it. It chugs on Windows. Only option is a lite Linux build.
Sure Apple could give it security updates if they wanted to, but most likely third parties are targeting the Mac OS version, not wether or not it’s supported. So youd still be in the same boat.
I see it's supported using OCLP. FWIW I have a 2010 that works decently on ventura (though I don't use it that way often, that's only a small partition for macos stuff, mostly it runs debian and acts as the machine directing 3d printing in my garage)
I *do* have a 2012 server mini that runs ventura great though, it's a machine I keep on a desk at my parent's house for when I have the need when visiting. That said it's a quad, which I don't think your 2014 is
Perhaps enough for folks that just want to push data over to be CUDA calculated… maaaaybe. But, used as an external GPU with performance at least as good as the internal HW? According to the most current information out there, it’s not going to be possible with Apple Silicon.
it's already been possible to run natively since early access (I've been running it natively on my 14" M1 Pro for 12+ months at this point). it runs well.
I really want some cool gaming brought to the Mac. It seems to be going backwards. All that there is these days is Nintendo style kiddy games in my opinion.
Nintendo style? Hardly. Nintendo make absurdly high quality AAA games aimed at people who really like games. That is very much not Apple’s focus.
Games suck on Mac, but I have loads of non-browser apps I run on Mac that don’t have good Windows equivalents. I can’t stand Windows UX and its difficulty with running Unix software anyway. I do most of my gaming on Linux. Mac is great for productivity, Linux and Windows is good for gaming. Windows is generally better for pro-3D, but my favorite app Shapr3D is better on Mac and iPad.
I do attempt to do some gaming on my Mac Studio, but even games that run well graphically often have input quirks etc. Things are certainly better then they used to be, so maybe in a few years. Linux surprisingly has gotten as good or better then Windows thanks to Proton. I think odds are good we might see something like proton on Mac now that Apple has a DirectX 12 shader compiler for Metal.
Last edited:
Uhhhh… ever heard of critical security standards such as SSL? Nowadays it's extremely difficult to get even a web browser running properly on G5 systems running Leopard (and the Quad G5 was a beast of a machine, with proper PCI-e slots and all, including a 16x one), which leaves you… you've guessed it, with PPC Linux as a viable option. And once Apple drops x86-64 builds of macOS and OCLP ceases to be an option for any and ALL Intel Macs in existence, in a few years Linux will still be there. And the same goes for AArch64 Linux, specifically for Apple's M-series SoCs, as Apple drops them one by one, as we all know they will. And on, and on…
For sure, there are machines whose performance is clearly not enough for “modern” usage (I mean, you can likely use them for very specific, mostly offline use cases, but they'll be as limited as they would be if they were running the last officially provided and supported OS). Or… maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. If any of you have 68k Macs alive and kicking in your collections and are willing to use them to test this, knock yourselves out: http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/ 😂
Last edited:
Nowadays it's really a usable browser that makes an old Mac obsolete or not.
He’s not being any more “obtuse” than the person he is replying to with his “planned obsolescence” throwaway remark. I and many others get lots of value out of older Macs even after they no longer get updates from Apple. If it’s that much of an issue, sell it and buy something with support
It'd be great if Steam for macOS could take whatever Apple put out and integrate it in the same way as Valve's own Proton. Steam for macOS is such a joke right now, with many of my games still showing 32-bit warnings.
Steam is ugly and confusing, but it's also the heart of PC gaming.
Thanks to Asahi Lina and other distributor who work on this project. it quite enjoyable to watch her coding live on YouTube. She is very patient and willing to explain what she is doing and how the program work to the audience even though maybe 90% of us may not understandard. To me, it's so complicated and it's deal with Hex Code, pointer, machine code, etc ) Anyway, it's give me a closer look how developer work on such a complicated project (Driver/Kernel). I had never imagine it can be managed by just few people.
Last edited: