I tried Windows gaming on a Mac
96 comments
·April 26, 2025roxolotl
darkteflon
Linux gaming is absolutely incredible right now. After an essay of several months, however, I recently switched my gaming rig back to Windows 10 for three reasons alone: the multiplayer game I mainly play with my buds is one of the very, very few that won’t work on Linux due to anti-cheat shenanigans, Steam Big Screen has a persistent bug with Nvidia cards even as of 560.x, and I could never quite get Sunshine + Moonlight streaming (essential for playing games with the kids around the house) working without micro-stutters. I fully expect 2 of those to be solved within the next few months (doubtless someone more proficient with Linux could solve them in an afternoon).
Very excited for SteamOS general availability for desktops. Owning a Steam Deck has made me really appreciate an immutable OS - especially for a gaming rig, which I don’t want to spend time maintaining.
Edit: As an aside, I’ll just add that for anyone interested in streaming, Steam Remote Play has quietly gone from being an also-ran, to genuinely excellent in the last couple of years. It requires - in my case at least - a lot less tinkering than S+M and produces an extremely low-latency, high quality feed.
roxolotl
So I actually tend to prefer couch gaming and I stream to a MacBook pretty often with Steam. Got an Xbox controller and the latency is basically 0. If you really want max quality, or you’re playing competitive fps games it’s not going to work but for single player games it’s been great.
odo1242
Linux gaming is actually significantly better than Mac gaming at the moment, in large part due to Valve. The GPU support is way better / faster and there’s less emulation overhead involved.
rcarmo
My gaming box (which I stream PC and retro games from to a handheld and the TV) is a Ryzen 7 APU running Bazzite. I have zero plans for ever running Steam on Windows ever again.
Wickedflickr
Proton (custom WINE by valve) is so good now thanks to Vulkan, you generally only lose about 5% performance compared to Windows, with a 10% difference in rare cases.
It's very easy to be a hardcore gamer on Linux now, outside of a handful of online games that gave yet to flip the switch to let their anti-cheat run on Linux.
culi
If you don't wanna pay $74 for CrossOver, there's also Whisky which impressed me and I've had great success with. It's an open source Wine wrapper for macOS
https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
EDIT: it seems that at some point in the past month the author stated whisky is no longer maintained!
jamie_ca
Note also that Whisky is no longer maintained, author suggests using CrossOver.
al_borland
I see the repo has fairly recent updates, but the website says the project is no longer actively maintained.
culi
Interesting! It wasn't the case when I first downloaded it last month!
al_borland
Looks like it was just 3 weeks ago.
https://github.com/Whisky-App/whisky-book/commit/463bfc39a6f...
ajdude
I wonder how this compares to porting kit and wineskin. That's what I've been using for Windows gaming on Mac and it's been running well for me on my m3 air- this is the first time I've ever heard of crossover.
LorenDB
I may be biased with my nice high end setup (Ryzen 9900X, 32 GB RAM, RX 6700 XT about to upgrade to 9070 XT) but 40 FPS at 1080p is NOT "great".
ddtaylor
I have a similar setup on one of my rigs and it does great for most 1440p titles. 6800 XT
dissent
It's less than I'd like to play at, but wasn't the point that it is great for something running on laptop hardware with integrated graphics? The implication is it would have been similar on native windows on comparable hardware.
kyriakos
...and 6700XT is not even high end or new.
svennidal
I do my work on a mac because I don't like the nuisance of trying to do it on windows. There is always some wonkiness that I don't even bother to remember the details of, because the solution is just to do it on mac.
I rather play games on windows because I don't like the nuisance of trying to do it on mac. There is always some wonkiness that I don't even bother to remember the details of, because the solution is just to do it on windows.
mmmpetrichor
counterpoint as a dev who works with k8s and wants a linux env:. I was told to get a mac when I joined and I wish I hadnt. WSL and vscode remote ssh make windows better for linux dev. the alternative is getting a parallels license. I mainly use vscode to remote to linux machines now and ignore my mac and wish it didn't exist. also as a longtime windows user i think the windows desktop is just better. window management, multimonitor, hell even launching apps is slow as shit on my mac m1 compared to my windows pc.
mmmpetrichor
bottom line: I dont know what dev workflows are better on mac, but if its linux, windows is now more linuxy than mac. imo.
ddtaylor
I don't use Windows, but WSL is legit IMO
bee_rider
Steam, on Linux and Steam on Windows are very similar experiences. Is it much worse on the Mac?
int_19h
It's a similar experience, but the library of natively supported games is fairly small, and ports are often poor quality - especially older games that haven't been updated in a long time and are broken in various ways on newer Mac versions. The most common problem I run into is the lack of high-DPI support, which means that you can't run the game at full 4K even if your display supports it.
ddtaylor
This is a reason many Linux gamers just use the proton version of the games in Steam. It's more consistent.
_bin_
This is probably true though as a non-gamer and recent mac convert I have basically zero complaints. Windows these days is full of too much crap that sucks away attention and makes it hard to use.
Average windows experience:
Welcome to BING (tm) with your MSN chumbucket spam links! Here's a desktop notification for a "sweepstakes"; no, you didn't get adware, just MS Windows! Enjoy this full-screen pop-up telling you to "prepare for windows 11" that completely disrupts your workflow when you're in the zone! Your computer is running slowly? Oh yeah, that's windows defender sucking up half your CPU, because not scanning every file would be a Security Risk (TM)! Want to turn that off? No worries, but you can't do that on the home edition because we don't give you group policy editor! If you do it anyway, we will re-enable this "feature" with every update and change the precise incantation of powershell miscellany, regedits, and menus that haven't been updated since the nineties you need to turn it off again!
We hope you enjoy your Windows (TM) 11 (TM) experience!
It's like fisher price, a casino mogul, and a schizo got together to cook up the latest batch of whatever slop microsquash is trying to pass off as a legit OS. Which is a shame, because the technical fundamentals are actually pretty sound. Some of this doesn't apply if you're using a corporate-managed machine, because companies don't want to put up with that nonsense, but a chunk of these annoyances still does.
It's weird to say but I enjoy using a computer to get stuff done substantially more after no longer using windows. While I still like linux, a bunch of software I need doesn't really work, and I don't have time to dick around with wine when I'm trying to do a job, so I'm glad there's a reasonably non-garbage option.
Windows will probably be the default corporate os for the forseeable future, but if the only people who actually have reasons to use it are "gamers", that should be a wake-up call for the ms product guys.
ewoodrich
I simply run this Powershell script once on a fresh install of Windows 11 and don't have to deal with any annoyances even after updates.
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
I daily drive MacOS, Windows 11 and Linux Mint on different devices and Windows doesn't particularly bother me post de-bloating, and it easily has the most reliable multi monitor/variable DPI when docking/undocking of the three in my experience.
_bin_
I used to lean heavily on stuff like this. Unfortunately, in recent years, something's changed with MS and they've started breaking stuff subtly in ways that shows up a few months later when you try to do something. This leads to either reimaging or a painful process tracking down some really obscure relationship. Not fun and not worth it, though I very much wish it worked like it used to.
Glad it's still working for some folks.
pelagicAustral
I love gaming, that's what got me into programming in the first place... my career right now. And I just learned after many painful attempts that unfortunately Windows, macOS and Linux all got their territory... I don't want to preach about any particular system, it's pointless, I gave up on trying to force my OS to do something is just not meant to be, that's how I ended up with one gaming laptop with Windows, one with pop OS and a macbook pro. I just switch them over and to be honest Im Happier now.
I must recognise that there is some overlap on the dev functionality now that WSL is a thing... years back it was crazy talk to try to do Rails on windows.
haberman
These days I game on a PC in the closet streamed to my Mac via Sunshine/Moonlight. Keeps the wires and fan noise out of the office, which is nice.
There’s a tiny bit of latency, but I’m not playing twitch reflex games on it.
AstroBen
has the meaning of 'amazing' changed recently?
throwaway0665
> 95% of the Wine code base we develop for CrossOver gets released back into the Wine project for the open source community
nice
apatheticonion
Yeah, nah. My M1 is basically dead to me for gaming. There are a _few_ games that run _okay_ but I now just carry a second computer for gaming. Salty because it's such a great computer nerfed by walled garden business practices.
iandanforth
This should be titled, "I Tried Windows Gaming on a Mac and With a Lot of Effort It's Passable!"
airstrike
The algorithm won't accept nuanced takes. Must fish for engagement.
II2II
To be fair, one couldn't have even said that much about Linux a decade ago even though Linux ran on the same hardware as Windows. Now we can say that we can do Windows gaming on Linux and it is amazing. It is possible to both play a huge swath of Steam games under Linux, with comparable performance to Windows, and to go the "a lot of effort" route with non-Steam games under Wine (again, with comparable performance to Windows). That's before considering native Linux games.
StanislavPetrov
It's funny how what people consider "a lot of effort" varies through the years. As a kid I was cracking open my apple-clone 5.25" drive and trying to manually adjust the drive speed with a screwdriver, with absolutely no documentation, internet or other support to help out - just to get a game work!
II2II
You're right. Even though I was thinking along the line hardware and software compatibility, repairs certainly fit the bill. It's not like today, where a flaky drive is simply replaced. A floppy drive of that era costed as much as an entire computer today. And let's not forget the MS-DOS era, when people were pretty much expected to tweak their system's memory configuration to play games (and different games required different profiles).
Out of curiosity, does kid-you remember whether the drive came poorly tuned from the factory or if it drifted after the fact. (Or perhaps it was the disk at fault, having been written on a poorly tuned drive.)
ChrisMarshallNY
Yup.
I use a Mac to get work done. It would be nice to use it for a bunch of games, but I really couldn't be arsed. If I really wanted to game, I'd set up a PC gaming box.
Antony90807
[dead]
santoshalper
Gotta love the irrational exuberance of Mac users.
sieabahlpark
[dead]
MillironX
Alternatives that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
- Just download the Game Porting Toolkit from Apple
- Use Porting Kit
- Dual-boot Asahi Linux and game from that partition
I've used all of these, and they all seem to perform about the same for me.
LorenDB
Sadly Asahi doesn't support M3/ME silicon yet, so the Mac in the article couldn't take advantage of Asahi.
ddtaylor
Does Mac not do Steam gaming the same way? In Linux I just press install and it works with my AMD card. I haven't pressed any other buttons. Fedora 42
p_ing
Linux works because it runs the most stable Linux ABI is available— Win32.
Mac users are generally running on aarch64 rather than x86, so you have the binary compatibility barrier. Plus no 32bit support.
LorenDB
Steam works, but most games can't be bothered to provide macOS builds, and some that do are 32 bit and thus cannot be run (macOS only supports 64 bit executables nowadays).
ddtaylor
Yes, but I am not running games for Linux. I play mostly games that are built for Windows, but they just launch in Linux because Valve made Proton.
I don't know much about it because I only use x86 on my workstations, but I believe it even can work across architecture because the Pi guys have done that too.
mayoff
Lots of older Mac Steam games support 64-bit but show the incompatibility warning in the store anyway. It’s annoying but with Steam’s return policy it’s not a real risk to test such games.
vanchor3
Lots of newer Mac Steam games do this as well. It's quite annoying as it also hides them from your library when you use the macOS filter.
I recently finished the latest iteration of a gaming PC and haven’t even bothered installing windows on it. Not Mac but it seems that Linux gaming is also basically Windows gaming at this point. It could probably play games on Ultra vs High if I used Windows but ads in the menu bar is a bridge too far for me.