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Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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Beating Mac in gaming is like beating Glass Joe in Punch Out!!
I have every OS and tons of computers. I used my m4 MacBook Air when I went to the hospital because the battery life is eternal and the speakers are uncomfortably good for something so small. I did play some games on it, and they ran incredibly for such a crazy small machine.
Alas.. the library that worked… SO SMALL! So many games are Windows/Linux only. I’d love to see that change, but luckily for me, that’s the only time I ever cared to try games on my MacBook.
I've owned a lot of macs over the last 30 years, but I don't think Ive tried more than once to game on them.
That’s fair haha. I bought a Mac in the late 2000’s specifically to play games! At the time, I wanted a thin laptop with a good screen, good battery life, super light, and a high end video card and processor. I was constantly playing games at friends’ houses and going to LAN parties, and by no means did I want a desktop to lug around with my giant CRT monitor and keyboard and all that shit.
All of the PC laptops at the time were HUUUUGE! I sold computers at the time, and I hated every design of every windows computer. I looked at the 15” MacBook Pro, with its … okay amount of RAM, excellent dedicated video card, better processor than any PC laptop, and holy shit over two thousand US dollars price tag and.. just went for it. Installed windows of course, and it played everything incredibly and was everything I wanted. A couple years later, it had an unfortunate accident and I had to get it written off under warranty, and paid a couple hundred dollars for a 2011 model. Did the same thing, installed Windows, and it played… everything amazingly. I love it. I still have it! I still use it! It has 16GB RAM and a SSD where the optical drive used to live now, but shit… still does standard tasks and video and whatnot totally fine!
Now, got a crazy deal on a MacBook Air last year. It COULD play games, but not much runs on MacOS. That’s okay though, it’s not what I got it for (NOTHING handles a photo library my size better than iPhoto, nothing even comes close.) love the thing, but Mac hardware playing games is over with the M series as far as I can tell.
Ah, but no-one would question Mac support when you're developing new software. If you can support Mac, which is certified UNIX, then the jump to supporting Linux isn't all that much extra, and we can prove there's a growing install base.
Started the ball rolling, and it just keeps going faster.
Games rely on more than just the OS API and even variation between Linux flavours or installed libraries on the same flavours can make compatibility difficult. My success rate at running games with a Linux native version is maybe 50% before I fall back to proton and the windows version. The consistency helps, though kudos to the developers who put in the effort to get their games working on Linux in general rather than just their particular systems.
The gpu library is a big one. There's OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan (which is the successor to OpenGL) that I know of. Linux and windows support all three, in some form or manner, but afaik mac only supports OpenGL, which really holds back game development, especially with DX being the most popularly targeted one.
Though my info might be a bit dated because I dgaf about macs generally, just wanted to point out that the shared roots between mac and Linux don't necessarily mean targeting one would make targeting the other easier in a meaningful way.
Maybe one day they'll sell a dongle to play games (which is really just a live boot linux install).
Oh definitely. Linux should definitely be targeted before macs because people who are on it I'm sure play more games. But again not a high bar as a lot of games never get Mac versions either.
A decade ago things were looking really positive for the future of Mac gaming. It felt like more and more games were coming out supporting it. I'm not sure if their transition away from Intel has hindered it, or if it's something else, but it definitely seems to have stalled.
Plus, the move to Apple Silicon has killed the back-up option of Bootcamp. Or I assume it has, I've not been a Mac user since before the transition, when my ageing MBP died and I just found I didn't need any laptop to replace it.
It's simple, Apple has never cared about gaming except for that 1 year you are talking about. They've done fuck all to get developers to target mac and it shows.
I'm talking about the whole period of like 2010 to about 2018.
I definitely don't remember any sort of golden era of mac gaming like that. I remember them announcing some games along with their Metal API's and that was about the end of that .
I wouldn't have described it as a golden era. More like a constant, steady, quiet sense of improvement.
I had a friend who gamed on a Mac for a while during that period, most games did work for her.
I do think the M series chips set it back a bit because most games aren't targeting ARM, so you have to use Rosetta to emulate reducing performance
And now Rosetta is getting deprecated in the next release too!
There are some pretty good emulation layers for the M chips. If Apple set up a certification program like Steam Deck has, they'd be in pretty good shape.
Except I'm sure they'd charge out the ass and they don't seem to put any effort into gaming 🤷
There's only three players. It's more like the second Piston Honda.