[HN Gopher] AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
        
       Author : 6a74
       Score  : 877 points
       Date   : 2024-10-10 14:16 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (rosenzweig.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (rosenzweig.io)
        
       | psanford wrote:
       | I'm a little sad that this has seemingly taken precedence over
       | all other hardware support. M3 support, dp-alt mode, making the
       | microphone work are all things that I was hoping were going to
       | land in the past year.
        
         | floydnoel wrote:
         | I'm aware of no better way to see your desired features land in
         | open source than to build them yourself. That is the power of
         | open source, nobody can stop you!
        
         | pbasista wrote:
         | I understand the sentiment. But the people who could work on
         | the Asahi Linux graphics stack are generally not the same as
         | the people who could e.g. bring up Asahi Linux on M3 chips.
         | 
         | I would not consider the lack of activity in some Asahi Linux
         | areas to be a conflict of priorities. It is in my opinion
         | mostly a result of these lacking areas naturally attracting
         | less developers capable of moving them forward.
        
           | porphyra wrote:
           | The M3 GPU is a lot different and has a bunch of new features
           | like ray tracing, so the super talented team working on the
           | Asahi Linux graphics stack might have a lot of work ahead of
           | them to support the M3's GPU fully as well.
           | 
           | God I wish I was smart enough to help out with Asahi Linux...
        
             | nxobject wrote:
             | Chipping into their Patreon helped me feel at peace with
             | not being smart enough!
        
         | talldayo wrote:
         | It's an Apple chip with no documentation and zero existent
         | driver code to reference. You _have_ to set realistic
         | expectations here, and acknowledge that not every contributor
         | is going to have the domain-specific knowledge required to make
         | everything work. It 's nothing short of a divine miracle that
         | it has working Vulkan drivers you can download within a half-
         | decade of it's release.
         | 
         | If you want more, you'll have to take it up with Tim Cook or
         | God (both have a nasty habit of ignoring us little guys). Also
         | an option: not using a laptop that treats Linux as a threat to
         | it's business model.
        
           | WD-42 wrote:
           | I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. This is the truth
           | people who buy Apple hardware need to hear.
        
         | dadoum wrote:
         | Alyssa Rosenzweig already talked a bit about that on her
         | Mastodon. She said that after having worked to implement a GPU
         | drivers, it was annoying that she never had the time to quite
         | finish them. On each device release, she had to support the new
         | device instead of polishing what she got.
        
         | vincentpants wrote:
         | AFAIK the M3 is going to take a lot longer as the asahi team
         | leverages apple silicon in their CI which means mac mini
         | servers and the M3 generation never got their mac mini. Of all
         | the generations to finally take the plunge into apple silicon,
         | I had to choose the weird one... (typing this on an M3 mbair
         | and not on linux sigh)
         | 
         | Ah yeah, here's the post:
         | https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/112277289414246878
        
           | WD-42 wrote:
           | Good grief what an uphill battle. It's amazing there are any
           | devs willing to put up with Apple hardware at all.
        
           | opan wrote:
           | Have you considered selling your machine and getting an M2 of
           | some sort?
        
         | WD-42 wrote:
         | I mean this is the nature of the beast with arm and apple. It's
         | a closed system. There are some devs that are going to be
         | willing to go through the effort just for the challenge of it,
         | but most are just going to use x86/linux because you don't have
         | to actively fight against the vendor.
        
       | anotherhue wrote:
       | Incredible work. May I also interest you in retrowin32
       | https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/README.md
       | 
       | Which is an attempt to collapse the stack so that fewer
       | translation and virtualisation stages are needed.
        
         | bni wrote:
         | This is great, hope it takes off
        
       | bee_rider wrote:
       | The M-series chips from Apple have some special hardware to help
       | emulate x86 with near-native performance, right? I wonder if they
       | take advantage of those features (actually I forget exactly what
       | the features were).
       | 
       | I mean this is an incredible achievement either way. _Everything_
       | is emulated, but they are still running AAA games. Wow.
        
         | captn3m0 wrote:
         | Rosetta 2:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
        
         | vyskocilm wrote:
         | I believe libkrun is the tech behind.
         | 
         | https://fosstodon.org/@slp/113283657607783321
         | 
         | Sergio Lopez has more info in his blog
         | 
         | https://sinrega.org/2024-03-06-enabling-containers-gpu-macos...
         | 
         | https://sinrega.org/2023-10-06-using-microvms-for-gaming-on-...
        
         | saagarjha wrote:
         | No reason they can't.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | If every layer of abstraction and emulation is set up to
           | allow it to pass through. It still seems really impressive to
           | me, like lining up a bunch of targets and shooting an arrow
           | through to get multiple bullseyes or something, haha.
        
             | dontdoxxme wrote:
             | Hardly, the benefit of binary is if everything lines up
             | once, it always will. It's not an analog world with pesky
             | things like wind resistance.
        
               | thfuran wrote:
               | Maybe if you happen to own the control stack from
               | hardware, OS, drivers, to client software and are willing
               | to never change any of it once you get things lined up.
        
             | saagarjha wrote:
             | It's not really all that hard
        
               | ramon156 wrote:
               | Would you say this is not impressive work? Or how come
               | you're saying it's not hard?
        
           | rowanG077 wrote:
           | Why not? In fact they are using it right now.
        
             | bee_rider wrote:
             | I think the comment was saying "there isn't any reason they
             | can't." Which is true in theory, but in the practice it
             | seems to be a lot of stuff to line up.
        
         | sumuyuda wrote:
         | They are using it:
         | 
         | Other than the page size issue, FEX and Rosetta are comparable
         | technologies (both are emulators, despite what Apple marketing
         | might have you believe). Both FEX and Rosetta use the unique
         | Apple Silicon CPU feature that is most important for x86/x86_64
         | emulation performance: TSO mode. Thanks to this feature, FEX
         | can offer fast and accurate x86/x86_64 emulation on Apple
         | Silicon systems.
         | 
         | From: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-asahi-
         | remix/x86-...
        
       | spease wrote:
       | This is super cool.
       | 
       | So, wait, does this mean that gaming is _better_ on Linux, on a
       | Mac?
        
         | ojdon wrote:
         | Yeah it has been for a while. The steam deck runs Linux out of
         | the box.
         | 
         | Valve and open source devs have put a lot of effort over the
         | years on projects like Photon which is a translation layer for
         | Windows games.
        
           | brookman64k wrote:
           | Proton, not Photon. ;-) Here is a list with games and their
           | support status: https://www.protondb.com/
        
           | zdragnar wrote:
           | The question was "better on Linux _on a Mac_ ", meaning
           | specifically Asahi Linux.
           | 
           | The correct answer is no, not yet anyway.
           | 
           | Linux running on x86 with proton is still the bee's knees for
           | most games though.
        
             | spease wrote:
             | > on a Mac
             | 
             | Right. It sounds like the Asahi devs have implemented APIs
             | which aren't available under stock MacOS.
             | 
             | Back when I was actively developing for Freespace, we had a
             | Linux port that had a better framerate than Windows (the
             | game's original platform).
        
               | fl0id wrote:
               | Afaik they are emulating, which you can do on macOS too.
               | Still great that it works with Linux
        
             | theLiminator wrote:
             | Better on Linux on mac (as compared to macos) maybe?
        
         | hu3 wrote:
         | I've been gaming on Linux since Warcraft 3 days.
         | 
         | Wine is wonderful and with Valve's help it only got better.
         | 
         | But why would gaming on a mac be better? Maybe one day, but for
         | now:
         | 
         | FTA: "While many games are playable, newer AAA titles don't hit
         | 60fps yet."
        
           | Wowfunhappy wrote:
           | I read the GP differently. I think they meant: if you are on
           | a Mac computer, is gaming better under Linux vs macOS?
           | 
           | I think the answer might be yes, because it's possible to
           | play so many more titles!
        
             | GeekyBear wrote:
             | Game emulation isn't a Linux only thing.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | But if anyone can name a non-Windows platform that does
               | it better, I'll wait!
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | Is there a way to run Control or Cyberpunk on macOS?
        
               | fl0id wrote:
               | Yes. Haven't tried those games, but on apple silicon
               | whisky app emulates with gameporting toolkit +
               | wine/proton. For intel silicon I think it was also
               | possible but not sure.
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | Oh, wow, I did not realize how many games worked with
               | this:
               | 
               | https://docs.getwhisky.app/game-support/index.html
               | 
               | I had assumed the lack of Vulkan on macOS was a major
               | issue. Apparently not!
        
               | fl0id wrote:
               | Yeah,can't tell you how it works exactly but it's quite
               | good
        
               | wsc981 wrote:
               | Cause MoltenVK [1] is used, I think.
               | 
               | ---
               | 
               | [1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
        
               | GeekyBear wrote:
               | Not really.
               | 
               | PC games use DirectX as their graphics API, so you need
               | something that can translate from DirectX to the native
               | graphics API your OS is running.
               | 
               | On MacOS you'd be translating from DirectX to Metal and
               | Apple provides the emulation software (D3DMetal) as part
               | of the Game Porting Toolkit.
               | 
               | On a Steam Deck, Proton uses Vulkan on Linux as the
               | native graphics API, so in that case you are translating
               | from DirectX to Vulkan.
               | 
               | > DXVK (which translates Direct3D 8, 9, 10 and 11 calls
               | to Vulkan on the fly), vkd3d-proton (which translates
               | Direct3D 12 to Vulkan)
               | 
               | https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Proton
        
               | outworlder wrote:
               | > PC games use DirectX as their graphics API
               | 
               | You are forgetting the increasing number of titles
               | targeting Vulkan directly.
        
               | GeekyBear wrote:
               | That is an extremely niche use case on Windows.
        
               | MobiusHorizons wrote:
               | That's true, but many titles are 32bit and Apple removed
               | 32 bit support, causing these titles not to run. It's a
               | real bummer, because there is no technical limitation.
        
               | GeekyBear wrote:
               | Crossover and Whisky run 32 bit PC games just fine.
        
               | sleepycatgirl wrote:
               | That's why the new WoW64 mode in wine is exciting. Even
               | if the system doesn't support 32 bit binaries, you can
               | still run 32bit windows software
        
             | valianteffort wrote:
             | I played through the entirety of Elden Ring and its DLC on
             | my macbook pro through GPTK which is a pretty modern and
             | demanding game. Don't think that would be possible on
             | asahi.
        
           | endorphine wrote:
           | Do you use Wine or Proton?
        
           | cdogl wrote:
           | > FTA: "While many games are playable, newer AAA titles don't
           | hit 60fps yet."
           | 
           | You're lucky to get 60fps playing a fairly undemanding game
           | on MacOS, even on hardware that is otherwise a dream.
           | 
           | For example, Baldur's Gate 3 is barely playable on my M3
           | MacBook Pro at well below native resolution with all settings
           | turned down. It's a brilliant game but hardly cutting edge
           | graphically.
        
         | GeekyBear wrote:
         | Emulation has unavoidable overhead.
         | 
         | For instance, Alyssa mentions in this post that most emulated
         | games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum.
         | 
         | In addition, native ARM games on MacOS don't have the
         | additional overhead of emulating a different CPU architecture
         | and Graphics API.
         | 
         | However, that doesn't take away from this emulated support
         | being an amazing achievement.
        
           | jillesvangurp wrote:
           | > most emulated games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at
           | minimum
           | 
           | That's because the RAM is shared with the GPU and most of
           | these games would require a GPU with at least 2-4GB on top of
           | the normal system requirement to have at least 8GB. So, 8GB
           | of RAM would be cutting it close on a mac since part of that
           | would have to be sacrificed for the GPU.
        
             | GeekyBear wrote:
             | Alyssa lays out the reasoning in the linked blog post.
             | 
             | They are running emulated games in their own separate
             | virtual machine, because Intel games expect a 4k page size
             | and the OS is running with a 16k page size.
             | 
             | Virtual Machines require their own chunk if memory
             | overhead, so the resource usage can't help being higher
             | than a native MacOS game's would be.
        
           | nottorp wrote:
           | > at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum.
           | 
           | And the minimum is pretty minimum. A 16 Gb arm mac will go
           | into yellow memory pressure while running emulated games,
           | I've noticed.
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | If you mean "I have a mac, is it better to run linux to game?"
         | 
         | Then there's a case for it, since you can run AAA games that
         | apple + macos doesn't support / allow.
        
           | GeekyBear wrote:
           | Nothing prevents you from running games under emulation on
           | MacOS.
           | 
           | Apple and Wine provide the tools, and apps like Whisky make
           | them easy to use.
           | 
           | > Essentially, this app combines multiple translation layers
           | into a single translation tool. It uses Wine, a translation
           | layer that allows Windows apps and games to run on POSIX-
           | based operating systems, like macOS and Linux. It also uses
           | Rosetta and the Game Porting Toolkit, which are two official
           | Apple tools that allow x86 programs to run on Apple Silicon
           | and serve as a framework for porting Windows games to macOS,
           | respectively.
           | 
           | Normally, this sort of process would require users to
           | manually port games to Mac. But by combining Wine, Rosetta,
           | and the Game Porting Toolkit, this can all happen
           | automatically.
           | 
           | https://www.xda-developers.com/hands-on-whisky-macos-gaming/
           | 
           | However, as aleays, running games under emulation has a
           | performance cost.
        
           | kergonath wrote:
           | You'd need to compare with what can be done on macOS
           | including with things like crossover and the GPT. AFAICT, the
           | Linux side is making progress, but still more games can be
           | run from macOS.
        
             | talldayo wrote:
             | > AFAICT, the Linux side is making progress, but still more
             | games can be run from macOS.
             | 
             | I don't believe that's true. According to ProtonDB, 80% of
             | the top-1000 most-played games on Steam are confirmed
             | working on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
             | 
             | I haven't seen any source documenting nearly similar
             | success rates with Mac but I also haven't seriously tried
             | gaming on Apple Silicon.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | steam deck is x86
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | What a coincidence! So are a variety of Macs that shipped
               | with hardware supporting Linux and Vulkan on day 1.
        
               | russelg wrote:
               | Yes, but this thread is about Asahi Linux, which is for M
               | series Macbooks. Not x86.
        
             | achandlerwhite wrote:
             | The Mac efforts rely on MoltenVK for and Vulkan needs which
             | itself relies on the underlying Metal API. As I understand
             | it Asahi/Honeykrisp driver for Vulkan does not rely on the
             | Metal API so it actually can do more conformant Vulkan than
             | Crossover/Whisky can. For example tranform feedback and
             | other geometry shader stuff will work on Asahi. MoltenVK is
             | working on it, but not there yet.
        
               | dagmx wrote:
               | You're ignoring D3DMetal which is what is most commonly
               | going to be used and equivalent to what Proton is doing
               | to convert D3D to VK.
               | 
               | Most games are D3D. A very small minority are Vulkan from
               | the get go.
        
               | achandlerwhite wrote:
               | On many games I have tried DX => DXVK => MoltenVk =>
               | Metal is significantly faster than DX => D3DMetal. For
               | example XCOM2 is about twice the frames per second (yeah
               | it has an official Mac version but it is even slower).
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | I will have to check this newest development out, but as
         | someone who dual boots Asahi and MacOS - up until now MacOS
         | with Crossover has definitely been the best experience, if you
         | are willing to pay
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | No, you'll still get better performance, more features
         | supported and lower overhead running with Game Porting Toolkit
         | currently.
         | 
         | That includes raytracing support and heterogeneous paging
         | support which are two things Alyssa calls out explicitly
         | herself. Not to mention the VM overhead.
         | 
         | That's not to say Alyssa's work is not very impressive. It is.
         | But GPTk is still ahead.
         | 
         | That's not even including the other aspects of Mac support that
         | Asahi still needs to get to. Again, very impressive work, but
         | the answer to your question is No.
        
           | risho wrote:
           | i haven't tested it extensively but i tried dark souls 2 on
           | parallels and there were vertex explosions making it
           | unplayable, using crossover and whisky it was a jittery laggy
           | mess. after seeing alyssa's talk i decided to load up asahi
           | and it ran perfectly max resolution 60 fps locked. gaming on
           | macos in my experience has been unplayable to the point where
           | i gave up even trying. after my experience with ds2 i think
           | that it's going to be significantly better.
        
             | dagmx wrote:
             | What backend did you use? You get very different results if
             | it defaults to MoltenVK versus d3dmetal
             | 
             | DS2 comes in both DX9 and DX11 flavours. The latter should
             | work better with d3dmetal and is more comparable to what
             | proton is doing.
        
               | risho wrote:
               | i never tried to change between dx9 and 11 in parallels
               | or crossover/whisky since i didn't know that was
               | possible, so i was using whatever is default. that said i
               | tried messing with all of the wine settings and it didn't
               | seem to make a difference. i even messed with stuff like
               | esync and msync (or whatever they were).
        
             | nottorp wrote:
             | How well do soulsbornes run on windows anyway?
             | 
             | My strong conviction is that From is pretty much
             | technically inept when it comes to Windows ports so I just
             | play their titles on console...
             | 
             | An emulated title that is in itself a not so great port
             | will have trouble ofc...
        
               | risho wrote:
               | it works on asahi without issue. that is with x86 to arm
               | translation, directx to vulkan translation, windows to
               | linux translation and 4k page to 16k page translation
               | running in a virtual machine.
               | 
               | as for how well fromsoft games run on windows you might
               | have been right 12 years ago when dark souls 1 came out
               | initially. it was a mess at the time, but souls games
               | have been running just fine on windows(and linux for that
               | matter) for years. it's only on macos that it is a mess.
               | this has nothing to do with fromsoft and everything to do
               | with macos.
        
       | mikhael28 wrote:
       | Fantastic! A great proof of concept on Linux - lots of AAA gaming
       | is already possible on Mac with Crossover and/or Parallels or
       | VMWare Personal, which is free! While I have a Steam Deck, gaming
       | on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a
       | controller.
        
         | cherryteastain wrote:
         | You can hook up a monitor, mouse and keyboard to your Steam
         | Deck to be fair.
        
         | zaptrem wrote:
         | Don't forget Apple's GamePortingToolkit based on Crossover/Wine
         | and the open source client for it Whisky. I think it supports
         | most games Linux Proton does now.
        
         | dcchambers wrote:
         | I know it's an extremely _un-Apple-like_ thing to do, but I
         | really wish Apple would team up with Valve to work on Proton,
         | and bring full Proton support to MacOS.
        
           | duskwuff wrote:
           | I wouldn't hold my breath. Valve is still bitter about Apple
           | deprecating i386 support back in 2019.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | Bringing Proton to Mac would involve either Apple making
           | amends with Khronos and supporting Vulkan, or Valve making
           | the substantial effort to port Proton to Metal natively, or
           | doing DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal translation with MoltenVK.
           | None of those sound very likely or optimal to me.
           | 
           | Besides, the main reason Valve is investing so heavily in
           | Linux and Proton is so their destiny isn't tied to someone
           | else's platform. MacOS is just another someone else's
           | platform like Windows is, with the same threat of getting
           | rug-pulled by a first-party app store that spooked Gabe
           | Newell[1] into investing in Linux in the first place.
           | 
           | [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18996377
        
             | wtallis wrote:
             | Apple already provides their Game Porting Toolkit which
             | includes a D3D12 to Metal translation later for Wine, and
             | it has been integrated into user-friendly Wine
             | distributions like Crossover since last year. There's not
             | much Proton has to offer over what's already available.
        
               | dcchambers wrote:
               | My understanding about the game porting toolkit is that
               | it requires developers to specifically modify their game
               | in order to make their game compatible.
               | 
               | The magic of Proton from a consumer point of view is that
               | it _just works_ for basically every game, sans those with
               | Kernel-level anticheat stuff. This means thousands of old
               | games that haven 't been updated in years will work.any
               | games that don't have active developers.
               | 
               | So Apples solution works for new games but isn't a
               | practical option for compatibility for existing games.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | crossover experience does not require manual modification
               | by developer
        
               | dcchambers wrote:
               | TIL about Crossover. Thanks!
        
               | jasomill wrote:
               | Also note that Codeweavers, Crossover's developer, is a
               | major contributor to both Wine and Proton, so there's a
               | great deal of, um, crossover between these projects.
        
               | fl0id wrote:
               | There is things like whisky app which makes it a more
               | general thing like proton
        
               | wtallis wrote:
               | The stated _intended purpose_ of the game porting toolkit
               | is to enable developers to modify their games. But the
               | software actually being shipped includes what is
               | literally a Wine GPU backend, which is usable by (and
               | already used and bundled by) consumer-facing Wine
               | applications like Crossover. If you go to Codeweavers,
               | download any Crossover for Mac from the past year (Sep.
               | 27, 2023 according to their release notes), you 're
               | getting a tool that includes the D3D to Metal layer from
               | Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.
        
               | dcchambers wrote:
               | Huh, TIL, thanks!
        
         | jack_pp wrote:
         | truth is macs have such a small market share for gaming that it
         | ain't worth the effort
        
         | opan wrote:
         | >While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I
         | refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.
         | 
         | Personally 99% of my Steam Deck usage is with it docked. I do
         | mostly use a controller, but also have it hooked to the same
         | USB switch as my PC so I can hit a button to move my keyboard
         | and mouse over.
         | 
         | Baldur's Gate 3 is the first game I ever ran on my Deck that
         | did not run very well, though. Most stuff I've played runs at
         | 60fps at my external monitor's 1920x1200 resolution. That in
         | addition to not liking the gameplay on BG3 much made me not
         | continue with the game, though I may revisit it someday.
        
         | WithinReason wrote:
         | BG3 is the only RPG I would play on a controller, it's very
         | well done. You can also connect a keyboard and monitor to the
         | Steam Deck, BG3 runs at 1080p high locked to 30FPS
        
         | nottorp wrote:
         | > I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller
         | 
         | I think you picked as an example one of the games that actually
         | has a native Mac version?
         | 
         | Or is it a well hidden wine package? I've played it start to
         | finish on Macs only and it looked too smooth to be emulation to
         | me.
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | I think at the moment, this is probably the only way to feasibly
       | game on a Mac. Crossover and other Wine-based apps as well as
       | Parallels are... not really truly possible. If you bought the
       | top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2021 with M1 Max and tried
       | to play anything reasonably modern on it, you'd find the
       | performance is basically not playable .
        
         | JeffeFawkes wrote:
         | I've been having good luck on my M1 Max MBP with Whisky, which
         | uses Apple's game porting toolkit: https://getwhisky.app/
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | I've been able to play a few games with crossover (like
         | overwatch 2) fine. Whisky also works for some stuff.
         | 
         | I also run Asahi so will have to check this out to compare
        
         | tbillington wrote:
         | I beat elden ring on m1 pro using Whisky :)
        
       | dcchambers wrote:
       | From a performance and technical perspective this is incredible.
       | Well done!
       | 
       | It will never happen, but my dream is for the Asahi devs, Valve,
       | and Apple to all get together to build out a cross-platform
       | Proton to emulate and play games built for Windows on both x86
       | and ARM hardware running Linux.
       | 
       | A Steam Deck with the performance and power efficiency of an
       | M-series ARM chip and the entire library of games that run on
       | Proton is just...dreamy.
        
         | tapoxi wrote:
         | https://www.pcworld.com/article/2465907/arm-version-of-steam...
        
           | dcchambers wrote:
           | That's awesome news!
        
           | sweeter wrote:
           | A lot of stuff like this shows up, they also have a fork of
           | waydroid and box64. I think a lot of them are projects and a
           | lot of them are just devs with a lot of agency who share the
           | dream
        
             | scheeseman486 wrote:
             | Steam Deck was made possible by their ongoing efforts to
             | enable the play of most of their games catalog on any
             | hardware platform that is computationally capable of
             | running them, regardless of OS or architecture.
             | 
             | The end game for Valve isn't Steam Deck 2 or 3 (which is
             | statistically impossible for Valve to produce), but for
             | Steam to be on everything.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Steam Deck was made possible by the plethora of the
               | Windows games developer market and Proton.
               | 
               | Most of the studios that own those games, and target
               | POSIX like OSes on mobile phones and game consoles, are
               | yet to bother with GNU/Linux versions for SteamOS.
        
               | scheeseman486 wrote:
               | Wine and DXVK are already running on Android and they
               | play Windows games with the rendering and computational
               | complexity of Fallout 4 at playable framerates on many of
               | the latest smartphone SoCs. It's still WIP, but it's
               | already gone beyond proof of concept, people are using
               | them. Valve don't need the developers to be on-board in
               | order to run their games on anything else, that's why
               | Proton exists.
               | 
               | What Valve want is the dissolution between
               | platform/architecture and store. By my eye, it's the
               | driving force of their efforts, more so than them selling
               | hardware or being the open source good guys. Not to
               | undervalue their work in helping make Linux a first class
               | citizen for gaming, but the core of their business model
               | is getting people to engage with their store, full stop,
               | and being able to sell their games on Android (and
               | elsewhere) would massively extend their reach.
               | 
               | This may go both ways too, there's also been indications
               | that Valve have been tinkering with Waydroid, meaning
               | Steam could also become a store for Android-native games.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | It looks more like how to avoid paying Windows licenses
               | for the SteamDeck to me.
        
               | wtetzner wrote:
               | I'd guess SteamOS is more about control than licensing
               | costs.
               | 
               | I don't think Valve wants to be at the mercy of Microsoft
               | and their policy & technical decisions.
        
               | kbolino wrote:
               | That's a small part of it, I think. They've almost
               | certainly spent a lot more on pouring time and effort
               | into Linux than they ever would have saved on license
               | fees. It seems like Valve doesn't want to be beholden to
               | Microsoft in any way. They support Windows because that's
               | where the users and the games are, but they don't want
               | Microsoft to be able to rug-pull them either.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Except that they are, to the extent they depend on
               | Microsoft technologies for the games that run on Proton.
        
               | kbolino wrote:
               | As far as I am aware, neither Valve nor the independent
               | Wine/Proton developers are bound by any licensing
               | agreements with Microsoft. They are clean-room
               | implementing the same technologies, but they are not
               | beholden to Microsoft in any legal way. Of course,
               | drastic changes in laws or policy regimes could alter
               | this dynamic, but those are out-of-context risks.
               | 
               | In order for Microsoft to rug-pull the technology (which
               | is quite different from rug-pulling the business model),
               | they'd have to break compatibility on Windows itself.
               | Video games remain a major reason for home users to run
               | Windows. Making ABI-breaking changes to Win32 or DirectX
               | is just not very likely to happen. And if it did happen,
               | it would be a boon to Valve and not a harm.
               | 
               | The biggest risk (and this would be a classic Microsoft
               | move, to be fair) I can foresee is aggressive API changes
               | that make it hard for Valve/Wine/Proton to keep up but
               | also make it hard for game developers not to. I'm not
               | exactly sure what this would look like, and a lot of the
               | core technologies are pretty stable by now, but it's a
               | possibility. It's not, however, going to harm anything
               | that already exists.
        
               | homebrewer wrote:
               | They can restrict .NET and the C++ stdlibs so that you
               | can only run them under Windows (through a license change
               | or by introducing a code check), but if they hadn't done
               | that in Ballmer days, I don't think they will now.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Because people love to celebrate Proton as if it was
               | doing anything for GNU/Linux games, when in reality is
               | another OS/2 take on Windows.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | It doesn't have to do anything for GNU/Linux games,
               | that's been an option for years and it's a ghost town
               | a-la Metal-native games. Valve (and the community) are
               | doing the right thing by ignoring the Apple strategy of
               | enforcing distribution terms they will abandon within the
               | decade. Developers that _want_ to program for Linux still
               | can. It 's just as stupid as it was when the first _Steam
               | Machine_ rolled out.
               | 
               | By supporting Proton, they are guaranteeing that modern
               | _and_ retro Windows games will be playable on Linux far
               | into the future. Trying to get the next _Call of Duty_ to
               | support Linux natively is, quite literally, a waste of
               | everyone 's time that could possibly be involved in the
               | process. I cannot see a single salient reason why Linux
               | users would want developers to release a proprietary,
               | undersupported and easily broken native build when
               | translation can be updated and modified to support
               | practically any runtime.
        
               | sweeter wrote:
               | Yea. You either have to pump a ton of money into it like
               | Apple tries to do to get devs to target your OS, or you
               | can take matters into your own hands and do the
               | unthinkable with Wine and Proton. Its unironically a
               | silver bullet solution. Otherwise we'd all be waiting for
               | years to make 1/1000th the progress
        
               | michaelmrose wrote:
               | The practical implication is that one can click one
               | button and buy install and play thousands of games on
               | Linux. Only MS stockholders are liable to care about the
               | implications for Windows.
        
               | johnfernow wrote:
               | We don't have to imagine what Linux gaming would be like
               | without Proton.
               | 
               | - CD Projekt Red: released Witcher 2 on Linux, didn't for
               | Witcher 3.
               | 
               | - iD Software: released Doom 3 on Linux, didn't for Doom
               | (2016) or Doom Eternal.
               | 
               | - Epic Games: released Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux,
               | but didn't for Unreal Tournament 3 or Fortnite. (A Linux
               | port was being worked on for UT3, but it ended up getting
               | cancelled.)
               | 
               | - Larian Studios: released Linux version of Divinity:
               | Original Sin, didn't for Divinity: Original Sin 2 or
               | Baldur's Gate 3
               | 
               | Many studios over the years have made native Linux
               | versions, and many studios stopped because the cost of
               | porting exceeded the revenue it generated. Proton didn't
               | exist when Unreal Tournament 3, Witcher 3, Doom (2016),
               | or Divinity: Original Sin 2 released, so Proton wasn't
               | the reason those studios stopped developing Linux titles
               | -- they stopped because it made no financial sense to
               | continue to make them.
               | 
               | Now, with Proton, 79% of the top 1000 games on Steam are
               | gold or platinum rated on ProtonDB. If you're fine with
               | minor issues, 88% are silver rated or better. For the
               | Steam Deck in particular, there are 5,500 verified games,
               | and 16,526 verified or playable games. So I'd argue
               | Proton is doing quite a lot for people gaming on
               | GNU/Linux machines, since they now have access to a solid
               | majority of the top 1000 games on Steam, both on a Linux
               | desktop and on a handheld.
        
               | sandworm101 wrote:
               | I am a strong linux supporter and I too do not like what
               | proton is doing to games. A few years ago there were many
               | significant games coming out with native linux capacity
               | (MineCraft, KSP, Factorio). Then proton dropped. Now,
               | rather than support linux natively, even the most pro-
               | linux developers are just expecting that their windows
               | version will run under proton. And those who are running
               | games under proton are essentially cut-off from customer
               | support. I've had a few games where a patch suddenly
               | stopped them working under proton. I have no recourse in
               | such situations. That is not a good trend.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | Linux is not a stable runtime in the first place. Unless
               | you are isolating, redistributing and sandboxing most of
               | the libraries used to run your game, it's almost
               | guaranteed to break when the dependencies are updated.
               | Windows apps don't have that problem, natively or when
               | run through emulation.
        
               | ikety wrote:
               | Genuinely what is the practical difference in this for
               | 99% of users? They just want to play x game. Proton
               | performance is pretty great, what else would be a problem
               | for those people?
               | 
               | Also when it comes to breaking proton support (Which does
               | happen) Valve + GloriousEggroll give you access to plenty
               | of older and special versions. Surely that's better than
               | rolling back entire software?
               | 
               | My game doesn't work -> I go to protonDB -> Users saying
               | use X Proton Version or Y ProtonGE version -> I switch
               | the layer used in steam
               | 
               | Hard to imagine a simpler process than that
        
               | homebrewer wrote:
               | Just ignore the guy, it's essentially the reverse of "I
               | run Arch BTW". Not just about Valve or Proton, but about
               | pretty much every FOSS technology that's celebrated here.
        
               | sandworm101 wrote:
               | Close, but the root is more nuanced. Once upon a time,
               | Microsoft was talking about regulating "apps" on windows
               | like Apple does for the iPhone. Valve saw the writing on
               | the wall: a potential ban on violent or otherwise adult-
               | themed games. So Valve started the steambox project. Get
               | the games running on linux/WINE and they could tell
               | Microsoft to push off. Years later, we have the steamdeck
               | as a revolutionary product and linux is the go-to OS for
               | portable gaming.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Running Windows games on top, which will work until it
               | doesn't.
        
               | michaelmrose wrote:
               | What trouble do you foresee?
        
               | rowanG077 wrote:
               | I mean practice has shown it's not a problem. What else
               | is there?
        
               | johnfernow wrote:
               | What do you foresee not working in the future?
               | 
               | If future versions of Proton break compatibility with
               | older Windows apps, you can use different old versions of
               | Proton for individual games. Steam makes this very easy
               | on Linux, but rarely is it necessary.
               | 
               | I don't foresee many Linux distros breaking compatibility
               | with Wine, which is good, as some devs argue Win32 is the
               | only stable ABI on Linux. [1]
               | 
               | I don't foresee legal issues either, as Wine has been
               | around for 31 years, and its corporate sponsors have
               | included Google in the past. I've seen no indication that
               | the project is on shaky legal grounds.
               | 
               | Microsoft could always create a new API that Wine doesn't
               | yet support, but good luck getting developers to use it
               | -- they've tried many times, but not much has stuck, and
               | most devs just stick with Win32. [2]
               | 
               | 1. https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
               | 
               | 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060678
        
               | p_l wrote:
               | I don't remember how officially it was stated, but
               | original push by Valve for steam on Linux with Proton was
               | to remove their dependency on Microsoft - a hedge against
               | possible future ecosystem-impacting decisions in Redmond.
               | 
               | Making SteamDeck use windows wouldn't impact prices much,
               | Microsoft is really friendly for putting windows by OEMs.
               | Could even run modified to act like current steam deck.
               | 
               | Instead, SteamDeck is there to drive up testing on Proton
               | or straight forward porting to Linux, which just
               | availability on Linux and the previous steam machine
               | didn't drive up
        
               | ikety wrote:
               | Linux/Unix has been used as a base overwhelmingly in
               | pretty much every new consumer OS for decades. Not to
               | mention Microsoft certainly cuts deals with manufacturers
               | when it comes to windows on portable devices (I think at
               | one point they offered free licenses on devices with
               | screen sizes under 8 inches).
               | 
               | The steam deck is 100% usable without leaving 'game mode'
               | even a single time. Something that is genuinely
               | impossible using Windows as a base. That's the important
               | part
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | You are right that many developers don't care and haven't
               | bothered with Linux, but one reason for optimism is that
               | this seems to be changing. Just looking through the list
               | of native Linux games today compared to what it was like
               | a year or 2 years ago, there are a lot more options. I
               | was looking through the list of Linux games on Gog, and
               | it is likewise in a much better position than it was
               | prior. I think there is much reason for optimism!!
        
               | grahamj wrote:
               | "There is now sufficient reason for greater optimism"
               | 
               | - Automated Personnel Unit 3947
        
               | reassembled wrote:
               | Everything except Windows 7 and XP that is.
        
               | jchw wrote:
               | I believe Valve dropped official Windows 7 support in
               | Steam because Chromium did and they weren't going to fork
               | it.
               | 
               | I empathize if you don't like any version of Windows
               | newer than 7 or XP, but it's time to let the dream of
               | running them forever go. It's not weird when software
               | doesn't support the 2009 version of an operating system
               | anymore in 2024. If they never dropped support, it would
               | be difficult to take advantage of improvements that
               | occurred in the last 10 years, because we'd forever be
               | stuck in baggage.
               | 
               | Of course when it's feasible everybody loves software
               | that really never does drop support, like 7-zip, which I
               | think happily still works on Win9x without KernelEx...
               | but I'd rather 7-zip stopped having serious security
               | issues than _continued_ to work on old Windows versions.
        
               | kbolino wrote:
               | Windows 7 was great and I'd love to go back. If I really
               | had my druthers, Windows 2000 was peak and XP was just a
               | vulgarized version of 2000.
               | 
               | However, it is Microsoft more than anyone else that has
               | decided to stop supporting those operating systems.
               | Windows XP does not have support for any modern version
               | of TLS (only TLS 1.0). There's no good way to support a
               | browser-based app like Steam on a platform that cannot
               | natively provide a secure connection to a modern web
               | server.
               | 
               | There is not such a hard reason to drop Windows 7 support
               | (again, except that Microsoft no longer supports it) but
               | there are security-relevant APIs that are only available
               | starting in Windows 10 which means special patches would
               | have to be maintained just for Steam on Windows 7 to
               | continue working securely.
        
               | lucasban wrote:
               | What do you mean Steam Deck 2 or 3 would be impossible?
        
               | vundercind wrote:
               | Steamdeck 3 being statistically impossible is a joke
               | about Valve having an aversion to releasing a #3 of
               | anything.
               | 
               | Half life 1, 2... hm.
               | 
               | Ok we'll make three HL2 episodes to follow that up.
               | 
               | Ep I. Ep II. Uhhhh... and let's stop there, just like
               | forever I guess.
               | 
               | Portal 1. Portal 2.
               | 
               | Left4dead. L4D2.
               | 
               | Team Fortress. TF2.
               | 
               | Counterstrike. CS2. Oh shit we're releasing a third one,
               | we might have to use the number three finally, oh no...
               | I've got it: CS:Go!
        
               | jakogut wrote:
               | Also, the successor to CS:Go is...Counter-Strike 2.
        
               | vundercind wrote:
               | Oh damn I got the order on those mixed up. Was probably
               | thinking of CS Source.
               | 
               | Regardless, point stands: they hate the number 3.
        
               | echoangle wrote:
               | They're probably doing it on purpose as a joke at this
               | point.
        
               | jakogut wrote:
               | It would have to be, CS2 is the fourth major installment
               | in the Counter-Strike franchise.
               | 
               | Then again, all kinds of companies take liberties with
               | naming including numbers. Look at Windows 7 (12th major
               | release), Windows 10 (successor to Windows 8), the game
               | Battlefield 2 (third in the series), Battlefield 3 (three
               | games after BF2), Battlefield 1 (after the release of
               | BF4), etc.
        
               | ohmahjong wrote:
               | It is a joke about Valve only rarely making the third
               | installment in any of their series (e.g. Half Life 3 not
               | existing) Edit: specifically including "3" in the title -
               | the actual number of games tends to be higher but with
               | different names.
        
         | rowanG077 wrote:
         | I'm not sure if you know. But Alyssa, the person who basically
         | wrote almost the entire userspace opengl and vulkan driver,
         | works at valve.
        
           | dcchambers wrote:
           | Wow! I wasn't aware, but that actually gives me a ton of
           | confidence that Valve isn't ignoring ARM with all of their
           | Linux + Proton work.
           | 
           | Her output is incredible.
        
             | inputError wrote:
             | Alyssa rules. We all love Alyssa.
        
               | 1-more wrote:
               | I see cats writing software _with hardly any
               | documentation_ like this and my brain melts. Power level
               | strictly monotonic, possibly exponential, and very very
               | large. Bravissima!
        
             | adastra22 wrote:
             | I hope they don't ignore macOS. They could port proton to
             | run on Metal + Rosetta and then Steam would support all
             | running windows titles on macOS and Linux.
             | 
             | I recognize it's a hell of an ask, but I think Alyssa could
             | pull it off.
        
               | pmarreck wrote:
               | I'm a huge macOS fan but even I have to admit that gaming
               | deserves to have a home on an open-source OS controlled
               | by no one (which would be Linux in this case) and that
               | Steam devoting effort to bring first-class gaming from
               | Windows to macOS is like working to escape from the
               | frying pan into the fire.
        
           | psd1 wrote:
           | I hope that she was working on Asahi full time at valve,
           | because if she did all that while also holding down a day job
           | then I might as well be soylent green.
        
             | jamiek88 wrote:
             | The 10x developer is real!
             | 
             | Sometimes you've just gotta tip your hat.
        
         | bmicraft wrote:
         | An ARM CPU only emulating x86 isn't going to be more efficient
         | than straight x86. ARM is barely more efficient as it is at
         | those performance levels.
         | 
         | The real reason Apple is ahead is because they're paying for
         | more expensive more advanced nodes for their CPUs. I you
         | compare CPUs on similar node sizes, you'll see that AMD and
         | Intel are basically caught up architecturally in perf/W
         | metrics.
        
           | aurareturn wrote:
           | This is definitely not true. M3 is 2x - 3x more efficient
           | than Lunar Lake on the same N3B node.
        
             | adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
             | I don't think that's true. M3 has much better idle/near-
             | idle power draw, but actual performance per watt when doing
             | things is pretty close.
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | No, it's the other way around. Intel has generally caught
               | up in idle power draw but is still severely behind in
               | performance per watt.
               | 
               | https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Lunar-Lake-CPU-
               | analysis-...
               | 
               | https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q
        
               | hedora wrote:
               | The last I checked, there low wattage AMD and high
               | wattage Apple had similar performance and wattage, so AMD
               | was the right choice for raw performance, and Apple won
               | for portable devices.
               | 
               | Intel was losing badly to one or the other at all TDPs. I
               | don't get the impression that's changed much. (Even if it
               | has, I can't remember the last time I encountered a non-
               | xeon intel machine with working hardware and drivers (for
               | any OS, and I tried Windows, Linux and macs).
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | AMD does not win over Apple for raw portal performance.
               | AMD does give you a lot of MT performance for a decent
               | price. You have to buy an M3 Pro to match an AMD HX 370.
               | However, you're sacrificing battery life, quietness,
               | portability, and ST performance with AMD.
        
               | Brybry wrote:
               | Remember that the latest Intel chips are a TSMC process
               | node now, that's a pretty big change.
        
             | high_na_euv wrote:
             | Have you seen Lunars iGPU?
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | Yes, M3 is still 2-3x more efficient than Lunar Lake's
               | GPU as long as it's not games that were more optimized
               | for x86 and or DirectX. For example, M3 generally wins in
               | compute with a lot less power needed.
        
           | adastra22 wrote:
           | There is no theoretical reason that is the case. These
           | systems would be transpiling, not interpreting.
        
         | alexr243 wrote:
         | You can play windows game with this release in Asahi Linux! So
         | it is possible now
        
         | shmerl wrote:
         | You don't need Apple for that.
        
         | log_e wrote:
         | If you want it to happen, ask them for it every day. You are
         | their constituent.
        
         | WD-42 wrote:
         | Apple is going to do the same thing they did with BSD, WebKit,
         | etc. They will wait until proton is mature enough, fork it,
         | then release it as their own. Why put in the effort this early
         | on?
        
           | WWLink wrote:
           | I think it's still hilarious and crazy that
           | safari/chrome/webkit/blink exploded out of the cute little
           | KHMTL browser called Konqueror in KDE from back in the day.
           | 
           | And the root of the whole browser wars thing was microsoft
           | making an absolute dog of a browser for Mac OS X when it came
           | out and then refusing to support it. lmao.
        
             | pjerem wrote:
             | Haaa Konqueror. It was THE shit back in the day. I loved
             | this software. It really was at the core of the KDE
             | experience. Too bad it disappeared, I miss it. (well it's
             | not technically dead but it's not moving either)
        
               | pxc wrote:
               | I came here to say this! Konqueror may have served a
               | small community but it was excellent.
               | 
               | It was the file manager as well as the browser and it was
               | incredibly capable. By far the most advanced GUI file
               | manager of its time. And a pretty fast and pleasant
               | browser, although the compatibility was hit and miss.
               | (Those were Flash and IE-dominated days as I recall
               | them.)
               | 
               | A lot of what I loved about Konqueror is captured in
               | Dolphin. I don't think I need my web browser to be a file
               | manager... maybe that concept was just a 90s fever dream.
               | But I miss Rekonq. Maybe I should revisit Konqueror.
        
               | kombine wrote:
               | Yes and I believe Dolphin is the best conventional file
               | manager on the market - superior to the Windows Explorer
               | and the file browser in in Mac OS.
        
             | aryonoco wrote:
             | IE 5.5 for OS X was by far the most standard compliant
             | browser of its time. It supported more CSS than either NN
             | 4.x or IE 5 for Windows. Nothing came to surpass it until
             | Mozilla 1.0 and even then it wasn't a slam dunk.
        
               | pmarreck wrote:
               | Yep. I remember those days.
               | 
               | I also remember Safari on Windows, which was convenient
               | for many reasons.
        
               | vitaflo wrote:
               | Was gonna say IE5 on OS X was the opposite of "a dog of a
               | browser". It was the gold standard against which every
               | other browser was compared because it was by far the most
               | standards compliant browser of its day.
               | 
               | Also a quick correction, there was no IE5.5 for OSX. That
               | was for Windows and used a diff rendering engine.
        
           | simonh wrote:
           | They won't do anything to undermine Metal.
        
             | WD-42 wrote:
             | No but it looks like they'll add Metal support to Wine, do
             | the bare minimum to comply with the license and release it
             | as "Apple game toolkit". Textbook.
        
           | pachorizons wrote:
           | Usually I would be as optimistic as you are about this,
           | because that would be the dream (although it would be nicer
           | for them to contribute to the project.) However, given
           | Proton's primary use case is gaming, such an effort will
           | almost certainly be kneecapped by Apple's historic half-
           | hearted commitment to anything other than microtransaction-
           | powered mobile games.
        
           | ascagnel_ wrote:
           | https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
        
             | WD-42 wrote:
             | Which is exactly what I described. Looks like they took
             | crossover/wine and added some custom patches. What are the
             | chances they upstream anything? Probably 0.
        
               | tomnipotent wrote:
               | Except it wasn't "taken", but licensed from CodeWeavers
               | in a commercial partnership. This implies that they're
               | contributing cash, not code.
        
               | WD-42 wrote:
               | Not sure what agreement they have there, but at the end
               | of the day it's Wine which has decades of open source
               | development behind it at this point. Plus a bunch of
               | other libraries (gstreamer being a notable inclusion)
               | that are all FOSS. This still fits the pattern of Apple
               | profiting off of OSS projects while contributing back as
               | little as they can get away with.
        
           | pmarreck wrote:
           | Apple literally already has released a game porting toolkit
           | which is basically Proton (see sibling reply)
        
             | WD-42 wrote:
             | Which is crossover/wine with custom patches.
             | 
             | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/homebrew-
             | apple/refs/...
             | 
             | 0 chance they upstream anything. So in a way they are
             | already benefitting from valves work.
        
         | johnnyanmac wrote:
         | that's ideally what Vulkan was for. Build for one common open
         | source standard, and then Apple/Microsoft/Google/Linux can all
         | build an API to support that.
         | 
         | But I guess there was never a time when an open graphics
         | standard stood as the leader. Maybe during a brief stint in the
         | Windows Vista era at best.
        
           | jorvi wrote:
           | During the Unreal Tournament 99 / Quake 3 era a lot of games
           | ran a lot better on Nvidia with OpenGL rather than DirectX.
        
         | tonyhart7 wrote:
         | or you know, just release a game on native linux build
        
           | pmarreck wrote:
           | The reason why this isn't more prevalent is twofold
           | 
           | 1) everything standardized, like it or not (note: I do not),
           | on the Windows API, and it has remained relatively stable,
           | which is important because
           | 
           | 2) Linux-native games I've had, have become un-executable
           | over time without semi-regular maintenance, and Windows games
           | running on whatever version of Proton they best work with do
           | not have that drawback
        
         | gchamonlive wrote:
         | It's more likely it'll be Qualcomm instead of apple and
         | eventually an arm based steam deck. These chips just make a lot
         | of sense for handheld devices.
        
           | KeplerBoy wrote:
           | Are the chips really fundamentally better than their AMD and
           | Intel counterparts made on the same node?
           | 
           | Sure it's a great design, but I believe x86-64 will catch up
           | once again now with everyone using TSMC.
        
             | psd1 wrote:
             | Arm has had a performance-to-power edge over x86 since
             | inception.
             | 
             | AIUI, if you want the most flops per die, you'll buy x86 -
             | probably the 128-core Xeon for enterprise money. But that's
             | not what's best for hand-held gaming.
             | 
             | AAA titles are typically GPU-bound anyway. More CPU flops
             | may not offer much benefit.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | > AAA titles are typically GPU-bound anyway. More CPU
               | flops may not offer much benefit.
               | 
               | Yes, but actually no. The Steam Deck is playing at
               | _extremely_ low resolutions. Rendering at 720p and 30fps
               | is (on paper) 8x less demanding on the GPU than rendering
               | a native 1440p60 experience. You can fully get by without
               | having a powerful dGPU, which is why the Steam Deck is
               | really able to play so many titles on a weak iGPU.
               | 
               | The problem is translation. Cyberpunk 2077 runs fine on a
               | 25 watt mobile chip that uses x86, which is why the Deck
               | even costs less than $1000 in the first place. If you try
               | to put a mobile ARM CPU in that same position and
               | wattage, it's not going to translate game code fast
               | enough unless you have custom silicon speeding it up.
               | There's really no reason for Valve to charge extra for a
               | custom ARM design when COTS x86 chips like AMD's would
               | outperform it.
               | 
               | For x86 PC games (which pretty much all games are,
               | today), ARM is at a substantial disadvantage, period. The
               | IPC and efficiency advantages are entirely lost when you
               | have to spend extra CPU cycles emulating AVX with NEON
               | constantly. If there were ARM-native games on Windows
               | then things might be different, but for today's landscape
               | I just don't see how ISA translation is better than
               | native.
        
       | hentrep wrote:
       | I noticed the URL was updated for this post. Previously it linked
       | to asahilinux.org which showed an anti-HN manifesto from the HN
       | referral. Curious as I haven't seen this before. Seems it has
       | been covered by previous commenters:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36227103
        
         | ginko wrote:
         | How can the site even detect where a user is coming from?
         | Browsers leaking this information seems like a huge privacy
         | issue to me.
        
           | robin_reala wrote:
           | Referer (misspelled in the spec) has been a part of HTTP from
           | day 1.
        
             | ginko wrote:
             | Feels crazy this isn't disabled by default
        
               | paraboul wrote:
               | This is part of the web DNA. Pages linking pages and
               | being aware about it. Origin can still disable it.
        
               | Smar wrote:
               | There is little hope to get it disabled when an ad
               | company is running running the most popular ad platf...
               | Erm, the world wide web browser.
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | The Referrer-Policy header lets a server tell the browser
               | how much referrer information to pass on when following
               | links, all the way down to nothing at all if desired.
               | Chrome does respect that, and they also followed other
               | browsers in changing the default to "strict-origin-when-
               | cross-origin" a few years ago which truncates the
               | referrer path when leaving to a different domain, so they
               | only see the domain the visitor came from rather than the
               | specific page like they used to. Can't really fault
               | Google in this case.
               | 
               | https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
        
               | mananaysiempre wrote:
               | See[1] the Referrer-Policy header, <meta
               | name="referrer">, <a referrerpolicy> and <a
               | rel="noreferrer">.
               | 
               | But generally, webmasters have found it useful to know
               | who caused their server to fall over^W^W^W^W^W^W is
               | linking to their pages. This was even used as a
               | predecessor to pingbacks once upon a time, but turned out
               | to be too spammable (yes, even more so than pingbacks).
               | 
               | After the HN operators started adding rel=noreferrer to
               | links to the Asahi Linux website, Marcan responded[2] by
               | excluding anyone who has the HN submit form in their
               | _browser history_ , which feels like a legitimate attack
               | on the browser's security model--I don't know how it'd be
               | possible to do that. (Cross-origin isolation is supposed
               | to prevent cross-site tracking of this exact kind, and
               | concerns about such privacy violations are why SRI has
               | not been turned into a caching mechanism along the lines
               | of Want-Content-Digest, and so on and so forth.) ETA:
               | This is no longer in place, it seems.
               | 
               | [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
               | 
               | [2] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622
               | 393719
        
               | miki123211 wrote:
               | > I don't know how it'd be possible to do that
               | 
               | It isn't, at least not in the way you think.
               | 
               | Visited links have always looked different from unvisited
               | ones, and the moment you could customize how links looked
               | via CSS, browsers also had to implement styling for
               | visited links specifically.
               | 
               | Modern browsers put a lot of care into making the changes
               | to those styles observable to the user, but not to
               | Javascript.
               | 
               | This is an extremely hard problem, and browsers have had
               | a lot of security issues related to this behavior.
               | Nowadays, you can only apply a very limited subset of CSS
               | properties to those styles, to avoid side-channel timing
               | attacks and such.
               | 
               | This means you can display a banner to anybody who has a
               | certain URL in their browser history, but you can't
               | observe whether that banner actually shows up with JS or
               | transmit that information to your server.
        
               | mananaysiempre wrote:
               | Ah. Ahhh[1]. I see.                 <!doctype html>
               | <style>a { color: white; background-color: white; }
               | a:visited { color: black; }</style>       <body><a
               | href="https://example.com/abracadabra" onclick="return
               | false">you are a bad person</a>
               | 
               | [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/docs/Web/CSS/:visited#pr...
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | > This means you can display a banner to anybody who has
               | a certain URL in their browser history, but you can't
               | observe whether that banner actually shows up with JS or
               | transmit that information to your server.
               | 
               | How do they stop you from using Canvas to see the output
               | and send it back?
        
               | zamadatix wrote:
               | Canvas can't "see the output", it only sees what is drawn
               | in it (which is not a set of HTML tags, it's JS
               | commands).
               | 
               | The screen recording/screen sharing API can be used for
               | this but security is the reason you have to give explicit
               | permission to the site before it can do this.
        
               | miki123211 wrote:
               | IIRC, Firefox had a bug where this exact scenario was
               | possible, I think you needed to embed the link in html
               | embedded inside an SVG, which was displayed in the
               | canvas, and then access the bitmap. You could e.g. make
               | the link black if visited and white otherwise, and then
               | the number of white versus black pixels in the bitmap
               | would tell you whether the link was visited or not.
               | 
               | There was also that asteroids game / captcha where links
               | were white/black squares and your goal was to click all
               | the black ones. Of course, clicking a square revealed
               | that you knew the square was black, which meant the URL
               | under it was in your history.
        
               | bigstrat2003 wrote:
               | Referer does have legitimate uses. For example, back in
               | the day people would use it to detect if someone embedded
               | an image from their site on another site. SomethingAwful
               | famously used to respond to any such requests with
               | goatse, and forums I was on had very strict "don't link
               | to SA images" rules as a result.
               | 
               | I think that using referer to try to deliver manifestos
               | to users of another site is kinda childish, but so it
               | goes. Every tool can be put to good or bad uses.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | It's only slightly less childish than the current WP
               | drama.
        
               | npteljes wrote:
               | There's a handy addon for Firefox called Privacy Settings
               | that can take care of that. Explicitly adds and option to
               | have the referers be not sent, and a quick way of re-
               | enabling it, in case it breaks a website. Because of
               | course that happens too.
        
         | stepupmakeup wrote:
         | The manifesto is longer than the content...
        
         | fullstop wrote:
         | It's almost as bad as jzw's website:
         | https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png (nsfw)
        
           | hentrep wrote:
           | He does the same redirect whenever someone links to his DNA
           | Lounge: https://dnalounge.com (NSFW)
        
           | justin66 wrote:
           | It's completely different. Jwz's is funny.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | The URL wasn't updated. You're thinking of
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799011, which was a
         | separate post.
        
           | hentrep wrote:
           | Ah, thanks for clarifying!
        
       | dancemethis wrote:
       | Where's the real inspiration for Asahi, Fandaniel in FFXIV?
        
         | rowanG077 wrote:
         | > Asahi means "rising sun" in Japanese, and it is also the name
         | of an apple cultivar. Xu ringo (asahi ringo) is what we know as
         | the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its
         | name.
        
       | Wowfunhappy wrote:
       | > Tessellation enables games like The Witcher 3 to generate
       | geometry. The M1 has hardware tessellation, but it is too limited
       | for DirectX, Vulkan, or OpenGL. We must instead tessellate with
       | arcane compute shaders
       | 
       | > Geometry shaders are an older, cruder method to generate
       | geometry. Like tessellation, the M1 lacks geometry shader
       | hardware so we emulate with compute.
       | 
       | Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to support
       | Vulkan themselves? Because they don't want to implement common
       | Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal
       | performance?
       | 
       | (I realize performance is still relatively fast in practice,
       | which is awesome!)
        
         | mandarax8 wrote:
         | Geometry shaders are not part of base Vulkan. They're an
         | extension.
        
           | ornitorrincos wrote:
           | they are not an extension, they are part of core 1.0 vulkan.
           | 
           | Although its true that they are an optional feature (as is
           | tessellation).
        
         | VHRanger wrote:
         | > Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to
         | support Vulkan? Because they don't want to implement common
         | Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal
         | performance?
         | 
         | Yes, it's a big reason.
         | 
         | I tried to port the yuzu switch emulator to macos a few years
         | ago, and you end up having to write compute shaders that
         | emulate the geometry shaders to make that work.
         | 
         | Even fairly modern games like Mario Odyssey use geometry
         | shaders.
         | 
         | Needless to say, I was not enough of a wizard to make this
         | happen!
        
           | miohtama wrote:
           | Why Apple does not just implement it? They have more
           | resources than anyone in the world. Patents?
        
             | kelnos wrote:
             | Because they don't care. They've decided that Metal is The
             | One True Way to write 3D-accelerated apps on macOS, so they
             | only implement the things in hardware that Metal requires.
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | Maybe, but we got here because I asked "is it possible
               | that Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan (in software)
               | because they don't want to support the features it needs
               | (in hardware)."
               | 
               | If the reason they don't support it in hardware is
               | because they don't want to support it in software, then
               | the logic gets a bit circular.
               | 
               | I'm interested in which came first, or if it's a little
               | of both.
        
               | p_l wrote:
               | Vulkan very much is designed to give flexibility to
               | hardware vendors. Where abstractions do paper over
               | differences it's generally where it makes the abstraction
               | cheap _in runtime_ but you might take more code vs. less
               | code but requiring a feature that would be otherwise
               | optional (for example some of the complex pipeline
               | manipulation Vs bindless)
        
               | wtallis wrote:
               | There are definitely some features omitted from Apple's
               | GPU, but fairly early in the reverse engineering process,
               | Alyssa Rosenzweig provided several examples of hardware
               | features present in Apple's GPU that are not exposed by
               | Metal: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-4.html
        
               | achandlerwhite wrote:
               | Perhaps, but also geometry shaders are generally losing
               | popularity and on their way out. Per google ai search
               | result (for what it is worth):
               | 
               | Geometry shaders are generally considered less necessary
               | in modern graphics pipelines due to the rise of more
               | flexible and efficient alternatives like mesh shaders
               | which can perform similar geometry manipulation tasks
               | with often better performance and more streamlined
               | workflows
        
             | Wowfunhappy wrote:
             | In hardware? I would assume because it takes up space on
             | the die, right? It's not free.
        
             | fl0id wrote:
             | Because they like to be different tm
        
             | dagmx wrote:
             | Geometry shaders have long been disfavored by all ISVs ,
             | not just Apple. It's just most include the software path.
             | 
             | If you're using geometry shaders, you're almost always
             | going to get better performance with compute shaders and
             | indirect draws or mesh shaders.
             | 
             | A lot of hardware vendors will handle them in software
             | which tanks performance. Metal decided to do away with them
             | rather than carry the baggage of something that all vendors
             | agree is bad.
             | 
             | It takes up valuable die space for very little benefit.
        
             | johnnyanmac wrote:
             | Geometry shaders have almost always sucked in all fairness.
             | I'm surprised a game newer than 2015 bothered with them.
             | It's been pretty common knowledge that geometry shaders
             | really only work better on Intel hardware (and I'm not sure
             | how long _that_ lasted).
             | 
             | Tessellation falling short is just classic Apple, though.
             | Shows how much they prioritize games in their decision
             | making, despite every other year deciding they need a AAA
             | game to showcase their hardware.
             | 
             | (apologies for the crude answer. I would genuinely be
             | interested in a technical perspective defending the
             | decision. My only conclusion is that the kind of software
             | their customers need, like art or editing, does not need
             | that much tessellation).
        
             | ribit wrote:
             | Are you talking about Vulkan or about geometry shaders? The
             | later is simple: because geometry shaders are a badly
             | designed feature that sucks on modern GPUs. Apple has
             | designed Metal to only support things that are actually
             | fast. Their solution for geometry generation is mesh
             | shaders, which is a modern and scalable feature that
             | actually works.
             | 
             | If you are talking about Vulkan, that is much more
             | complicated. My guess is that they want to maintain their
             | independence as hardware and software innovator. Hard to do
             | that if you are locked into a design by committee API.
             | Apple has had some bad experience with these things in the
             | past (e.g. they donated OpenCL to Kronos only to see it
             | sabotaged by Nvidia). Also, Apple wanted a lean and easy to
             | learn GPU API for their platform, and Vulkan is neither.
             | 
             | While their stance can be annoying to both developers and
             | users, I think it can be understood at some level. My
             | feelings about Vulkan are mixed at best. I don't think it
             | is a very good API, and I think it makes too many
             | unnessesary compromises. Compare for example the
             | VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer and Apple's argument buffers.
             | Vulkan's approach is extremely convoluted -- you are
             | required to query descriptor sizes at runtime and perform
             | manual offset computation. Apple's implementation is just
             | 64-bit handles/pointers and memcpy, extremely lean and
             | immediately understandable to anyone with basic C
             | experience. I understand that Vulkan needs to support
             | different types of hardware where these details can differ.
             | However, I do not understand why they have to penalize
             | developer experience in order to support some crazy
             | hardware with 256-byte data descriptors.
        
               | MBCook wrote:
               | I'm not a game programmer, so I just sort of watch all
               | this with a slightly interested eye.
               | 
               | I honestly wonder how much the rallying around Vulkan is
               | just that it is a) newer than OpenGL and b) not DirectX.
               | 
               | I understand it's good to have a graphics API that isn't
               | owned by one company and is cross platform. But I get the
               | impression that that's kind of Vulkan's main strong suit.
               | That technically there's a lot of stuff people aren't
               | thrilled with, but it has points A and B above so that
               | makes it their preference.
               | 
               | (This is only in regard to how it's talked about, I'm not
               | suggesting people stop using it or switch off it to
               | _thing_ )
        
               | shmerl wrote:
               | Nothing stops them from providing their own API and
               | Vulkan both. So your arguments only make sense for why
               | they might want other API but they don't make sense on
               | the part reasons for completely denying Vulkan support
               | alongside it. There is no good reason for that and the
               | apparent reason is lock-in.
        
           | ronsor wrote:
           | Why couldn't you just use MoltenVK?
        
             | slimsag wrote:
             | MoltenVK doesn't support geometry shaders for ~3 years
             | now[0]
             | 
             | [0] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1524
        
         | mrpippy wrote:
         | Metal 3 (in 2022) added mesh shaders, which can be used to
         | emulate geometry shaders.
         | 
         | We (CodeWeavers) are doing this in (a fork of) MoltenVK, and
         | Apple's D3DMetal is as well.
        
           | achandlerwhite wrote:
           | Hi, is there a plan to submit these changes back up to
           | MoltenVK?
        
             | mrpippy wrote:
             | We would still like the changes to be upstream but they may
             | need more polish, and it spawned a conversation about the
             | division of responsibilities between SPIRV-Cross and
             | MoltenVK:
             | 
             | https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross/pull/2200
             | https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross/pull/2204
        
         | ribit wrote:
         | Apple not supporting Vulkan is a business decision. They wanted
         | a lean and easy to learn API that they can quickly iterate
         | upon, and they want you to optimize for their hardware. Vulkan
         | does not cater to either of these goals.
         | 
         | Interestingly, Apple was on the list of the initial Vulkan
         | backers -- but they pulled out at some point before the first
         | version was released. I suppose they saw the API moving in the
         | direction they were not interested in. So far, their strategy
         | has been a mixed bag. They failed to attract substantial
         | developer interest, at the same time they delivered what I
         | consider to be the best general-purpose GPU API around.
         | 
         | Regarding programmable tessellation, Apple's approach is mesh
         | shaders. As far as I am aware, they are the only platform that
         | offers standard mesh shader functionality across all devices.
        
         | shmerl wrote:
         | That might be an excuse, but that's hardly a reason. They are
         | simply extreme lock-in proponents and don't want to support
         | cross platform graphics API. That's the real reason.
        
           | wtetzner wrote:
           | > They are simply extreme lock-in proponents and don't want
           | to support cross platform graphics API.
           | 
           | Which seems like an ineffective move when you have no market
           | share.
        
             | shmerl wrote:
             | They don't seem to care. I'm sure that will bite them in
             | the long term, but for now they are very intent on complete
             | NIH and lock-in anywhere they can push it.
        
       | xbar wrote:
       | Thank you                   Alyssa Rosenzweig         Asahi Lina
       | chaos_princess         Davide Cavalca         Dougall Johnson
       | Ella Stanforth         Faith Ekstrand         Janne Grunau
       | Karol Herbst         marcan         Mary Guillemard         Neal
       | Gompa         Sergio Lopez         TellowKrinkle         Teoh Han
       | Hui         Rob Clark         Ryan Houdek
        
         | dyingkneepad wrote:
         | Thank not only these people but also their employers for
         | funding the work.
        
       | gertop wrote:
       | Marcan and asahi Lina are the same person.
        
         | preisschild wrote:
         | Is there actually any proof of that?
        
           | anonfordays wrote:
           | Yes, a lot, it's basically confirmed. Last time someone
           | linked proof, it got flagged immediately. Kiwifarms is a
           | dumpster fire, so I'm not going to search or link anything.
        
             | epcoa wrote:
             | Must it really be confirmed or proven? This isn't a court
             | of law.
             | 
             | But when someone willingly posts (and keeps) this publicly
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk
             | 
             | and then acts offended or claims doxxing (and starts using
             | it to stir shit up for leverage) when people draw the
             | obvious conclusion, that's behavior in bad faith and should
             | be called out as such and dismissed.
        
         | neoromantique wrote:
         | And we would care because...?
        
           | ashirviskas wrote:
           | Because they were mentioned twice..?
        
             | neoromantique wrote:
             | If they insist on using a pseudonym it is their right,
             | going out of your way to unmask pseudonyms is scummy(akin
             | to doxxing).
        
       | lynguist wrote:
       | May I use this space to ask the question: is the M3 substantially
       | different from the M1 and M2 that it is not supported?
        
         | gilgoomesh wrote:
         | I don't know how different but it apparently has dramatically
         | improved hardware shaders compared to earlier M chips so I'm
         | guessing that a lot of this might be different, there.
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | The M3 GPU added a bunch of features including ray tracing. The
         | "dynamic caching" sounds like a big change to local memory
         | which could require serious driver changes.
         | 
         | https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938676/apple-m3-chip-g...
        
         | fl0id wrote:
         | Yes. And also some other peripherals are different.
        
         | pbasista wrote:
         | From what I understand, one of the factors to not focus on
         | Asahi Linux on M3 for now is the lack of an M3 Mac Mini which
         | supposedly makes the development easier.
        
         | geokon wrote:
         | last I check you can't even buy M1 macs on apple's website
         | anymore (maybe it's region dependent)
        
         | aykevl wrote:
         | M3 and M4 haven't been supported yet because they weren't a
         | priority (looks like they've been focusing on gaming support
         | for the last year or so).
         | 
         | Alyssa said in her talk that they'll probably get it working in
         | 6 months or so:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDsksRBLXPk&t=2932s
        
         | ribit wrote:
         | M3 GPU uses a new instruction encoding, among other things.
         | Also, it has a new memory partitioning scheme (aka. Dynamic
         | Caching), which probably requires a bunch of changes to both
         | the driver interface and the shader compiler. I hope the Asahi
         | team will get to publishing the details of M3 soon, I have been
         | curious about this for a while.
        
       | Thaxll wrote:
       | I see that they're using FEX, what about box86? Is it comparable
       | in term of performance?
        
         | 58028641 wrote:
         | box86 does ARM32 which isn't supported by Apple Silicon
        
           | Thaxll wrote:
           | box64 if you prefer.
           | 
           | https://box86.org/2022/03/box86-box64-vs-qemu-vs-fex-vs-
           | rose...
        
             | ThatPlayer wrote:
             | Box64 _only_ does 64-bit binary translations. So for
             | example Steam cannot run on box64 alone because it 's a
             | hybrid with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries:
             | https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/?tab=readme-ov-
             | file#notes-a...
             | 
             | Wine has beta support for 32-bit Windows applications on
             | 64-bit-only wine, but it's not default.
             | 
             | They also address it: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-
             | US/fedora-asahi-remix/x86-...
        
       | paulryanrogers wrote:
       | It is shocking the effort required to have a good gaming
       | experience on Apple computers (excluding iOS). They always struck
       | me as agnostic to games, yet in recent years it appears to border
       | on open hostility.
        
         | fl0id wrote:
         | They made gameportingkit, which got made into whisky app. So
         | not totally hostile
        
         | kalleboo wrote:
         | Apple has always been anti-gaming. It's been in the companies
         | DNA since the first Mac was derided as a "toy" for having a
         | graphical user interface, and they overcompensated trying to
         | make it a business machine with no games.
         | 
         | About once a decade someone inside of Apple who is really
         | passionate about games pushes some project through - you had
         | GameSprockets in the 90's, you had someone convincing Valve to
         | port Half-Life, you have GamePortingKit now, but it's just not
         | in the companies culture to give game developers the long-term
         | support they need.
        
         | snarfy wrote:
         | It was Jobs specifically that was anti-gaming. I'm not sure
         | where Cook stands.
        
       | whimsicalism wrote:
       | Wish NixOS (or at least Arch) were supported on the level that
       | Fedora is
        
         | opengears wrote:
         | NixOS is fully supported https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-
         | apple-silicon/blob/main/do...
        
           | WorldPeas wrote:
           | I used to daily drive this. Works quite well.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | yeah but it's a bigger pain
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | and yet how do i install this gaming support on nixos?
        
             | pxc wrote:
             | You'd have to package FEX :D
             | 
             | For the kind of person who wants to run NixOS on Apple
             | Silicon or do Linux gaming on Apple Silicon in the first
             | place, that's probably interesting and not too hard
             | 
             | but if you're allergic to that, you might be able to figure
             | something else out with Box64, which is already packaged in
             | Nixpkgs
             | 
             | x86_64 gaming on NixOS is of course well supported and has
             | been for a long time. There's a 'native' package that I've
             | always used and the Steam Flatpak is also available and
             | works as well as it does anywhere
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | we are talking about asahi linux. i think it is pretty
               | clear that nixos isn't supported like a first class
               | citizen because you have to do a fair bit of work to make
               | all of the more recent userspace fixes work on NixOS. i
               | run NixOS Asahi so I know.
               | 
               | it was easier when Arch was a first class citizen but the
               | advice nowadays you get upon encountering a problem on
               | Arch is to switch to Fedora
        
               | IntelMiner wrote:
               | Perhaps if the NixOS folks want better support they
               | should invest more time in keeping up with Asahi Fedora?
               | 
               | The developers can use what they want. Marcan famously
               | used Gentoo for many years
        
       | fl0id wrote:
       | Yeah yeah great, now please m3 support, or maybe before that
       | support for internal mic and external displays/dp-alt. Pretty
       | please? (Not complaining happy about any progress)
        
         | Philpax wrote:
         | kinda sounds like you're complaining, though
        
           | fl0id wrote:
           | Fair point :)
        
       | wly_cdgr wrote:
       | Ok, but why would a hardcore Linux person want to play games that
       | embody everything they hate about Windows in their mode of
       | production, data gathering practices, politics, etc?
        
         | Philpax wrote:
         | linux users like to have fun too
         | 
         | Also, there are plenty of Windows-only games that aren't
         | subject to those practices. Free games, itch.io games, GOG
         | games, etc. There's a big world out there!
        
           | lmm wrote:
           | > there are plenty of Windows-only games that aren't subject
           | to those practices. Free games, itch.io games, GOG games,
           | etc. There's a big world out there!
           | 
           | Those games are generally not AAA by definition, and often
           | either already have a Linux build released, run acceptably
           | under traditional emulation, or both.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | It's just a platform which is an available option. Nobody
         | forces you to play games that you don't agree with for any
         | reason.
        
         | _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
         | People use Linux for a wide variety of reasons and those
         | reasons are very often not ideological. If the only reason to
         | use Linux was ideological, Linux wouldn't be as popular as it
         | is.
        
         | umanwizard wrote:
         | There are lots of reasons to run Linux. Not everyone who runs
         | it is a free software ideologue.
        
         | nottorp wrote:
         | Stay away from the companies requiring their own game store /
         | "club" (i'm looking at you Rockstar) account and you're likely
         | to be fine.
        
       | WorldPeas wrote:
       | all I need is DP alt mode and I'm switching!
        
       | jayd16 wrote:
       | This makes me think of the classic clip of George Carlin telling
       | a joke about the difference between heaven and hell [1].
       | 
       | Is there a modern equivalent with FAANG, Microsoft, Sony, Valve,
       | etc.?
       | 
       | [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8xPC4NEro
        
         | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
         | In heaven, Microsoft is in charge of gaming, Amazon does the
         | customer service, Apple is responsible for privacy, Facebook
         | does the UI, and everyone works at Google.
         | 
         | In hell, Apple is in charge of gaming, Google does the customer
         | service, Facebook is responsible for privacy, Microsoft does
         | the UI, and everyone works at Amazon.
        
           | Arcanum-XIII wrote:
           | "Amazon does the customer service"
           | 
           | Sure this isn't Hell ? Because customer service at Amazon is
           | a best non existant, at worse actively against you...
        
             | raffraffraff wrote:
             | Can't you famously just return stuff to Amazon within a
             | month for basically any reason? I purchased a monitor from
             | Dell and after a few weeks it became clear that there was a
             | loose connection internally. It was extremely simple to
             | prove. But getting it replaced was hell. I went through the
             | whole process of creating a ticket, talking to 3 different
             | people, taking photos of the thing from every angle and
             | then after _they_ failed to get back to _me_ for a week, I
             | emailed for an update and was told  "Sorry sir, there was
             | no activity on the ticket for over a week so the ticket was
             | closed". It didn't matter that the delay was on their side.
             | And no they wouldn't reopen the ticket, and no I couldn't
             | refer to the old ticket, and no the old photos wouldn't
             | work. Start over. Talk to several different support people
             | _again_ , take all those photos _again_.
             | 
             | My SIL bought a scanner from Amazon a few months back and
             | never unboxed it because she was moving house. When she
             | did, it was faulty. They took it back without much of a
             | fight even though the month was up. She just said "I
             | unboxed it yesterday, it's broken".
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | It's changing. I imagine that was always intended to be
               | an introductory thing to cement their position in the
               | marketplace.
        
               | xnzakg wrote:
               | Good old enshittification. Make it good to attract users,
               | then optimize for profit once the users can't leave.
        
               | thaumasiotes wrote:
               | What's stopping the users from leaving?
        
               | fsflover wrote:
               | https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
        
               | thaumasiotes wrote:
               | That is not a compelling case for Amazon locking
               | customers in. You can't make a purchase anywhere else
               | because you paid for Amazon Prime?
        
               | InDubioProRubio wrote:
               | From citizen to shitizen.. we need a virtual sovyeet
               | union in antartica.. systemic competition
        
               | oarsinsync wrote:
               | It's been like that for over a decade now. I hope you're
               | wrong, but I fear you're not.
        
               | jjk7 wrote:
               | Not a chance -- if I can't easily return things I might
               | as well go back to in-store or use aliexpress or similar.
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | Amazon's customer service (for the web store at least) is
             | fantastic.
             | 
             | Even if the core shopping/delivery service fails you, if
             | you complain, they'll take the "customer is always right"
             | position and make you whole. They'll refund or re-ship with
             | no questions asked, without requiring you sending back
             | anything or even so much as providing proof.
             | 
             | I'm sure some people must take advantage of that level of
             | customer service, but it's a really pleasant experience.
        
               | leghifla wrote:
               | Be cautious about calling their customer support if you
               | have "bought" DRM stuff: you can be banned for any reason
               | at any time.
               | 
               | I complained about a failed delivery (broken box, one
               | item missing). They refunded me but then immediately put
               | me on a watch-list, threatening to ban me if I ever
               | complain again. I will never buy anymore on amazon.
               | 
               | See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41555898
        
             | apetrovic wrote:
             | I bought Kindle Paperwhite with ads. Get tired of ads.
             | Tried to pay Amazon to remove ads, for some reason it
             | didn't work (I'm not from USA).
             | 
             | Contacted customer support, explained what's the problem,
             | the person on the other side said "wait a minute, sir" and
             | removed ads from my Kindle without asking me to pay for it.
             | 
             | That was a good experience with Amazon.
        
             | aktuel wrote:
             | Based on my own experience it is still fantastic. Not long
             | ago I had an issue with an order and a real human called me
             | back right away outside normal office hours. No waiting in
             | a phone queue. And he was actually able to help me. If that
             | is not excellent I don't know what is. I don't know of any
             | other large company with a remotely similar customer
             | experience.
        
           | 35mm wrote:
           | Facebook's UI is slow as hell.
           | 
           | But otherwise this is accurate.
        
             | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
             | Perhaps I should have said "UI design" instead of "UI".
             | 
             | I feel a little guilty, because it's all based on
             | stereotypes, and I don't have enough firsthand experience
             | to say which stereotypes are true.
        
               | nkrisc wrote:
               | It's fine since the original joke is based on stereotypes
               | too. The stereotypes are the joke.
        
           | meindnoch wrote:
           | Facebook's UI is slow and buggy.
           | 
           | Are you putting them in charge of UI because they've made
           | React? (which is already a cardinal sin in my book)
        
           | jayd16 wrote:
           | This is good but the punchline needs to be punchier.
           | 
           | I do like the implication that were working in the warehouse
           | and not AWS but maybe it's too subtle.
           | 
           | You might also be able to do something with the surprise
           | switch from Linux to Linus. In heaven code is reviewed on
           | GitHub [...], in hell [...] a nd your code is reviewed by
           | Linus.
        
         | tmtvl wrote:
         | Shamus Young had a gaming equivalent (unfortunately I can't
         | find the actual comic, the Internet Archive may have it,
         | though): https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=9866
        
         | dang wrote:
         | We detached this subthread from
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41802586. Not a criticism
         | --it just went pretty far off topic.
        
       | nxobject wrote:
       | If only I had "canapplesiliconemulatewindowsgames.com"!
        
       | amoss wrote:
       | I'm slightly confused after reading about page alignment. Why
       | would a 16k page be less aligned than a 4k page causing
       | assumptions about pointers within those pages to break? The 4k
       | pages on x86 are aligned on 4k boundaries, are the 16k pages on
       | M1 aligned on <4k boundaries?
        
         | y1n0 wrote:
         | There are more 4k boundaries than 16k boundaries. The issue is
         | code compiled for 4k boundaries running on a 16k system.
        
           | amoss wrote:
           | I'm missing something here. Assuming there are pages at 0k,
           | 16k, 32k etc - all of those pages are aligned on 4k
           | boundaries as 4k > 16k. So code written with the assumption
           | that its pages are 4k aligned should have that assumption met
           | when running with 16k pages. It is still early here and I
           | have only had one cup of coffee. Am I misunderstanding
           | something really obvious?
        
             | dezgeg wrote:
             | x86 app might mmap 8kb, then munmap the second 4kb and
             | expect that to work. But not possible on 16k pages.
        
               | amoss wrote:
               | ah ok, so it would not be pointer alignment inside the
               | pages but instead the assumption that page +4k is a page.
        
               | MBCook wrote:
               | I was a little confused by that in the article as well.
               | It being a granularity issue makes more sense to me.
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | I'm just blown away at all the work they're able to do with a
       | platform that they basically reverse engineered. I'm glad to be
       | contributing to their efforts. I'm also waiting for when M3
       | support comes! Such a cool group of engineers and hackers. I love
       | it.
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | I still wonder why valve is that much reluctant at porting its
       | proton stuff into the simple and plain C99 of wine/vkd3d.
        
         | aleden wrote:
         | Then what is proton written in? C++?
        
           | sylware wrote:
           | wine and vkd3d are plain and simple C99.
        
         | seabrookmx wrote:
         | Likely because their engineers are more productive in C++?
         | 
         | Modern C++ with move semantics is a lot more easy to reason
         | about and memory safe than C99, IMO.
         | 
         | Since it's a greenfield project, they didn't have to worry
         | about the nasty baggage of legacy C++ spaghetti that kills most
         | projects.
         | 
         | Just because you prefer "simple" C99 doesn't mean they do :)
        
           | sylware wrote:
           | I think there is something wrong with them because they are
           | failing to see that the c++ syntax has an abysmal complexity
           | which propagates the toolchain implementation.
           | 
           | This is the only reason you need to make this language a
           | definitive nono.
           | 
           | They should be ashamed of themselves, and if they are not,
           | well, they are toxic, and they are doing it at worldwide
           | scale.
        
             | seabrookmx wrote:
             | Ironically, I think this comment is much more toxic than a
             | developer writing free software in a language of their
             | choosing.
        
             | rowanG077 wrote:
             | You are right of course that c++ is abysmal. What your are
             | overlooking is that C is an even bigger trash fire nuclear
             | foot gun.
        
       | macrolime wrote:
       | Does this mean we're closer to getting GPU support on Docker on
       | Apple devices?
        
         | ribit wrote:
         | No.
        
       | ZiiS wrote:
       | For people like me who have been using Ashai for a while but are
       | not Fedora natives; TIL `sudo dnf system-upgrade download
       | --releasever=40; sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot` is necessary
       | first as the normal upgrades left me on 39.
        
       | joelthelion wrote:
       | Realisticly speaking, is Asahi Linux usable right now for a
       | random schmuck who just wants to use his computer?
        
         | umanwizard wrote:
         | Depends what kind of computer you have and what you want to do
         | with it. M3 does not work at all. M1 is the best supported but
         | even there some important things like microphones and
         | thunderbolt still don't work.
        
           | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
           | So no
        
             | umanwizard wrote:
             | If you expect to be able to install it on any random Mac
             | computer without thinking and have everything work, then
             | no, it's not there yet. But I think just saying the answer
             | to the OP's question is "no" would have been an
             | oversimplification.
        
       | MBCook wrote:
       | I think my favorite little bit from the article is that they're
       | using a VM to "fix" the page size differences between macOS and
       | Windows.
       | 
       | What an ingenious idea.
        
       | qkhhly wrote:
       | can i play black myth wukong with it?
        
       | xuQH9W3HP8 wrote:
       | I believe it would be pertinent to mention the following:
       | 
       | What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as
       | I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not
       | an operating system unto itself, but rather another free
       | component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the
       | GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components
       | comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run
       | a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing
       | it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which
       | is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users
       | are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by
       | the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are
       | using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is
       | the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the
       | machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The
       | kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless
       | by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete
       | operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the
       | GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with
       | Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions
       | are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-10-11 23:02 UTC)