No Doom?
I’m still in shock how quickly they have progressed.
is linux already better for gaming on macs than macos?
Sure looks like it
I’d argue that it may come to that, given the poor availability of (steam) games for the macos platform. And when it is available, you may end up with a disclaimer that it may not run anyway.
You’ve gotten a lot of answers (mostly no), but I will say Minecraft runs better on Linux on Mac than MacOS on Mac!
You can use Whisky which is a convenient wrapper for WINE to run the Windows version of Steam. Simple games like Dredge work flawlessly on my M1 but anything used for benchmarking FPS is unacceptably slow. Translation of Intel code is the biggest issue. I assume Asahi has the same limitations as Mac OS but it is impressive what they’ve been able to do.
There’s a native Linux version of Steam (at least for Ubuntu / Mint) that works great. It also uses a proprietary Wine wrapper called Proton, that’s pre-configured for all your Steam Library games.
Native in this case means processor architecture, not OS. The Linux Steam is still x86/x86_64 code and to run it on an ARM system (even running Linux) will require an emulation layer. This adds substantial amounts of overhead, much more than Wine/Proton does for Windows games on Linux.
Sorry I was very unclear. Whisky is an app for MacOS. I’ve used Steam on Ubuntu as well and it works OK but sometimes is a pain to find a version of proton that works for a given game.
So how does that work given that most Steam games are x86/x64 and the M2 is an ARM processor? Does it emulate an x86 CPU? Isn’t that slow, given that it’s an entirely different architecture, or is there some kind of secret sauce?