Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: LoudTechieApple finally started nearly caring for gaming(Game porting toolkit). Also Valve has been sponsoring Apple gaming, since around the same moment they started sponsoring Linux gaming(MoltenVK), modifying open source is just easier.

Good points, I had forgotten about GPTK and MoltenVK. Both lackluster compared to what we get on Linux, but certainly positive steps. Seems like MoltenVK is on the way to being deprecated in favor of KosmicKrisp that is part of Mesa.

Apple isn't used to having to do an effort to achieve market share.
Their current market share was handed to them out of anti-trust concerns and thanks to their vendor lock in they can expand to whatever they like, usually.
Even their development they tend to leave to the bsd community. Valve wins by doing nothing, Apple thrives by doing nothing.

On the lacklusterness. Lets not forget that Mac is a very different platform than the Linux desktop.
It's not a path to freedom, it's a path to chains and protection.
Apple losing the EA lawsuits was also a boost for Apple gaming, since this slashed the prices.
For small companies that mostly make money through initial sales, Apple gaming is still too expensive, but AAA players now can make some pretty sweet money.
These AAA players also much more trust Mac for anti-cheat than Linux.

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Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: CatKillerIn case you'd like a graph

Thanks for making that, it illustrates two perhaps surprising points:

1) Steam Deck usage has stayed relatively flat - or more accurately, has scaled at the same rate as total Steam usage.

2) macOS usage declined for years, but in recent times it has scaled at nearly the same rate as desktop Linux. I wonder what factors are involved with that; I don't think Valve has done anything major on that front, and to my knowledge Apple hasn't done anything to improve things for gaming (they are actively hostile to it in some ways).

1) yeah, Valve went into it pretty cautiously the Steam Deck is a pretty niche product as you expressed before.
2) That's part Microsoft, part Valve and part Apple. Most consumers consider the choice Apple(expensive, but less espionage) and Windows(espionage, but cheap and capable). Microsoft has been behaving pretty shitty lately including becoming more expensive(Win10 EOL). Apple finally started nearly caring for gaming(Game porting toolkit). Also Valve has been sponsoring Apple gaming, since around the same moment they started sponsoring Linux gaming(MoltenVK), modifying open source is just easier.

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Quoting: ertuqueque

Quoting: EssojeI'd love to appreciate these small victories for Linux, but together with the RAM crisis and the news lately, all I can see here is the gruesome death of consumer PC hardware. It's like partying on top of a sinking ship.
This will likely force people who want to play games to be part of a closed garden like game consoles, or to pay for remote applications/machines. It really feels like we are going back to the remote terminal days, as ironic as that is.

I'm most likely wrong, but if I dare to speculate (and dream), maybe the RAM crisis will persuade people to stick with their current, aging PCs and what better for an aging PC than Linux?... Some people won't be able to afford a new PC to install Windows 11 so they'll try Linux.

Especially in combination with Win10 EOL. You can't hold to on it, but you can't replace it, maybe ditch it.

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Quoting: Saracen26I've been using Linux on and off for 19 years. Primarily for curiosity and the last decade for the Emulation side of things. My 2020 Gaming PC still recently ran on Windows 10 for convenience. I then the purchased a Legion GO S (SteamOS) and it proved incredible. So I was looking for a brand new rig to install CachyOS on. Now the RAM crisis has hit, I can't afford a new build so I stripped Windows on my current rig and went to CachyOS anyway. I wish I'd done this sooner, especially since I don't do multiplayer gaming. I don't think I realised how good Linux Gaming has gotten.

As you, so nicely display. It's easy to know Linux without knowing the quality of Linux gaming.
They're two very, very different worlds.
Linux is mostly driven by chip strength and price in the sense that every new use case for computers uses Linux by default and places new strains on vendors to support it and that computational potential is directly related to chip power.
Linux gaming is not driven by new potential, discoveries and/or research, but market politics. The fear of others drives one to free software, since if everybody is super(user) nobody is.

Valve sacrifices games for API and market access certainty.
Microsoft sacrifices customers to get stronger IP(Intellectual Property) guarantees in the wider sense.
Apple knows that anti-trust concerns only stop Microsoft from retracting killer app access as long Linux stays insignificant, so they backed the Wine project. Even fear for Linux can drive one to contribute to it, since open source lifts all boats.
Microsoft multiple times tried to sacrifice the game market to rid themselves of Intel's hold on their business.

Yet NVIDIA improves Linux not out of fear, but reward through the AI bubble.
Google throws considerable weight behind it, because of Android.
Printer vendors introduced wireless printing for mobile.
Most virus scanner support comes from the cloud.

The best example are though containerized packages(such as snap, Flatpak, etc.).
The Cloud drove demand for binary formats(packages) and saw the value of a standard(appimage), mobile drove containerization, but mostly after a direct compile and fear for sketchy games and production software drove Canonical to Snap, but nobody trusted it, which drove the community to Flatpak, which does the same, but federalized.
This's where we're now.
The next step would probably be government pressure on repos, which would drive it to decentralization(think torrenting, but with peerage based trust metrics).

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: EssojeI'd love to appreciate these small victories for Linux, but together with the RAM crisis and the news lately, all I can see here is the gruesome death of consumer PC hardware.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. The AI bubble is getting rickety . . . and when it pops, it will probably take a whole lot else with it, including crypto. At that point all the computer stuff will get cheap again. With the massive recession nobody will have any money so we still won't be able to afford it, but it will be cheap.

Crypto already popped this's its stable state: infinite rug pulls.
Yes, individual coins sometimes go up and sometimes down. If it was stable it would be unsuited for rug pool scams and illegal trade.
Nobody is buying large amounts of mining hardware anymore, because scamming poor smugs out of their money is more profitable.
Crypto won't die. It fulfills some pretty important functions for those in power. Criminals and intelligence agencies profit at the cost of law enforcement. Members of volatile state managed economies have a relative "safe haven" for their assets(remember after the rug pull many crypto assets have an acceptably stable price development).

AI replaced it and instead of attracting wealth from the powerful who have to hide their faces in fear, it spoke to a higher class, which knows it's above the law and thus doesn't have to hide anymore. They buy the same things in the same order.
CPUS->GPUS->ASICS->RAM->Customers.
There is one difference this time the start wasn't open source, so they managed to get themselves trapped in a vendor lock in.
Tip if you have an ancient computer science problem you think you can make less hard with unending amounts of computational resources, just follow the playbook and get rich.

Edit:
Might I suggest software proving(by exhaustion).

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: LoudTechie64 Bit wine can't launch 32 bit applications.

Proton has included support for Wine's WOW64 mode for a while now. This shouldn't be a blocker anymore.

By providing 64bit and 32bit libraries(a.k.a 64 and 32 bit wine).
Those 32bit libraries make it a 32bit client.

32bit libraries or wine binaries are not needed in WOW64 mode. That's the whole point. Although I suppose Steam will have to ship them for older Proton builds.

If I install Wine on 64bits system it requires me manipulate my repos to also allow installing 32 bit libraries and then it installs 32 bit wine libraries.
EDIT: If I want to run 32bit or 32 bit reliant software(its technically optional, but the 32 bit stuff won't work, just like vulcan integration is optional)

That's because your package is not a pure WOW64 build. That's up to the package maintainer. 32bit Windows software runs on 64bit (WOW64) Wine without 32bit libraries. You can keep claiming otherwise, but I'd rather you just looked into it if you don't want to believe a random person on a forum.

A. My excuses you were right about the WoW build and I also misunderstood your claim.(I thought WoW was just some creative abbreviation for wine.)
B. Proton doesn't seem to use the WoW build [External Link]. This could be for backwards compatibility(reconfiguring all existing Wine prefixes without triggering anti-cheat blocks) and OpenGL preformance [External Link].

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Quoting: NonjuffoValve probably ran out of stock on the old APU and it's more cost effective to just concentrate on the newer 6nm one.

This.
It has been deprecated for a long time they were just selling old stock.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: LoudTechie64 Bit wine can't launch 32 bit applications.

Proton has included support for Wine's WOW64 mode for a while now. This shouldn't be a blocker anymore.

By providing 64bit and 32bit libraries(a.k.a 64 and 32 bit wine).
Those 32bit libraries make it a 32bit client.

32bit libraries or wine binaries are not needed in WOW64 mode. That's the whole point. Although I suppose Steam will have to ship them for older Proton builds.

If I install Wine on 64bits system it requires me manipulate my repos to also allow installing 32 bit libraries and then it installs 32 bit wine libraries.
EDIT: If I want to run 32bit or 32 bit reliant software(its technically optional, but the 32 bit stuff won't work, just like vulcan integration is optional)

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: LoudTechie64 Bit wine can't launch 32 bit applications.

Proton has included support for Wine's WOW64 mode for a while now. This shouldn't be a blocker anymore.

By providing 64bit and 32bit libraries(a.k.a 64 and 32 bit wine).
Those 32bit libraries make it a 32bit client.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: StellaI thought I read something somewhere about the 64-bit client being unable to launch 32-bit games?

PCGamingwiki says this about the Linux client:

User requests for a native 64-bit client have been denied by Valve on numerous occasions since 2014, purportedly since such a client would be unable to launch 32-bit games.

I wouldn't think so. Your 64 bit environment is able to start 32 bit Steam, why would the chain break if one more application is 64 bit?

64 Bit wine can't launch 32 bit applications.
I think they calculate proton to be part of the Steam client(with which I agree), while the 32 bit trickery of the windows api did come build in with Windows(Win 11 is trying to change this, but thanks to legacy applications like Steam this is currently being maintained)

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