Exactly. I am a casual gamer at best. I am an Apple power user. I lucked into a gaming PC a couple weeks ago for $50 at a thrift store. So I have a PC just for gaming. I think non MS users who game probably have the same. Likely a dual boot Linux/MS computer.
It is kind of annoying you can't game on Macs, however thats just how things are. Cars handle better than Trucks, and Trucks can haul more than cars. There is a lot of overlap in what they can do, but ultimately they have different specialties.
That said, my experience with Microsoft from a long time *nix users has been pretty horrible. I do think a lot of this is Microsoft, but a lot of it is going from being a poweruser to being a total novice is quite annoying.
I'm also a primary mac user and have been almost my entire life. I have a pc that literally does nothing but play games, it's a stupid expense at this point. I may not bother to buy another to replace this one when it's finally to slow to bother with. May be a console life for me.
Steam Deck is OK. Probably too expensive if you're not gonna play it as a portable ever, but not awful. The desktop experience is a jank-fest (the usual amount of Linux desktop jank, plus a whole pile more for some reason) but it's pretty good, actually, as long as you avoid desktop mode and stay in the Steam experience as much as possible.
It is too underpowered to do much gaming at 1080p (let alone 4k) except older games, but handles its native ~720p pretty well. You have to go into desktop mode to get higher res than that (on an external monitor), but you'll only want to do that for games that are both older (so that it can run them at tolerable frame rates at 1080p) and that really need the extra pixels, anyway. The Proton stuff works quite well, most things that run well on modern Windows in widescreen without a bunch of hand-ini-editing config tweaks or whatever work fine on the Steam Deck without much pain.
Decent option if you catch it on sale. Depends on what you play, though. Some folks find its mouse emulation touchpad thingy decent, but I found it a fun-killing chore for any kind of pointy-clicky-draggy games (Paradox, various tactical war games). But, you can play those games docked with keyboard & mouse and they're ok.
It's a hell of an emulation system for older console games....
If you’ve got a solid internet connection, streaming services have become pretty viable these days. I just stream GeForce Now to my MacBook, and just the fun novelty of playing Cyberpunk at 4k “on” a little laptop has yet to wear off.
Yup, generally I would agree. But as I commented elsewhere on this post, I like to install mods for my games which is not something I could do with just the streaming solution as far as I know.
I am a big Microsoft guy but I am about to have zero windows machines in my home.
The final justification for a physical windows desktop was to play games, but I haven't touched a single title in months. Gaming feels like something I am completely over at this point.
My ideal tech stack at home is starting to look like one MacBook as you say. All the windows stuff I do for work is on a Windows365 desktop in the cloud. I've got a region within 10 milliseconds of my home office and it's been working out great so far.
Will probably get rid of these boxes before next year rolls around.
Could you elaborate on this more? What do you mean? What makes you a big Microsoft guy? I mainly ask because everything else you said seems contradictory of that so I'm curious your definition
> Gaming feels like something I am completely over at this point.
Which is why releasing games for Mac users has less sense, than Windows or Linux. You're probably in the category of a casual gamer, which is served well by mobile games.
I recently switched to Nobara Linux (a gaming focused Fedora spin) and it has run every Steam game I've thrown at it outside of Street Fighter 6 (which runs, but at low settings and multiplayer is spotty). Proton has done wonders for Linux gaming and after over a month without booting my Windows partition at all I don't think I'm going back.
+1. I can't stand Windows. I can't wait for the day I can use macOS as a daily driver for gaming (I already use it as a daily driver for everything else).
Not with the newer arm64 chips. The best you can do is a VM, which is going to not going to be performant for demanding games. It might work okay for older titles.
I do wish I could go mac only - my desk would definitely look tidier. But I don’t see it happening soon.