And only adding Apple Silicon just now??? It's been out for 5 years!

To be fair: How many games on Steam support ARM anyways?

I think it is because they are killing Rosetta support. Will this affect gaming?

Rosetta 2 is supposed to be available for older games only but I’m not sure how they’re planning to enforce that. Maybe some kind of whitelist? Either way it was a travesty that Valve didn’t bother before. Running what is essentially a full web browser through Rosetta couldn’t ever work well because of all of the reconciliation already happening there.

I mean sure, but apple killing Rosetta support is also idiotic. I think that they just want to turn OSX into iOS which is just awful.

There's Proton for Apple sillicon IIRC

Apple doesn't care about maintaining compatibility. Look at their previous changes such as PowerPC to x86 and forcing 64-bit only applications.

Probably was just for the old Intel Macs. Proton/Wine could be used on OSX for a long time. Wine for ARM has also been a thing for a while. But it only worked with ARM Windows software. Combining Wine with x86 emulation has also become a thing in the last few years. And rumor has it that Valve have beem dabbling in it as well for Deckard. But I don't think it's very widespread yet. But that is probably about to change when Valve are increasing their ARM Mac efforts.

_laughs with Apple AirBuds in ears_

Considering they just turned iPadOS into macOS--I doubt they're trying to turn macOS into iOS. They're just being their typical, stuck-up, stingy asshole selves. Use Metal, or die. I was like "hey, Apple Silicon looks like a great turnaround!" and indeed it was--I love my M1 Max MacBook. Now, they're going backwards _again_. Frustratingly, they're also going forward with the launch of their OSes this year. It's a sidestep. Again. I, and others, are only playing this game so many times, so I have no idea what the strategy is.

Apple not keeping legacy cruft is why they were able to move to ARM so quickly. For all the grumbling about cutting 32-bit support couple of years ago, this is what allowed them to do that (among other things). And, as demonstrated, developers like Valve take action only when they are forced to. Windows and Linux on ARM are stuck in the mud with no end in sight while Apple is almost done with the transition.

Linux on ARM is stuck in the mud? Huh? Everything works fine on ARM, including the desktop. There are like a billion ARM devices running Linux right now. Or did you mean Linux on Apple hardware? Because that's by design.

Since we’re talking about Steam here for example, Valve have not even bothered to release a _64-bit x86 client_, let alone Arm client, except for Mac.

Right, I'm not talking about Steam, I don't think misk was either, the context is Apple transitioning to ARM silicon. Also Steam definitely runs native 64 bit on x64 systems. It's intended to run in either environment, and so will have 32 bit deps, but if you start Steam, the actual executables you're running (e.g. ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper) are 64 bit ELFs when needed. And, of course, games run in 64 bits and link to a 64 bit steam client library.

Oh really? Nice, that's news to me. Last I checked (admittedly not recently) it needed a bunch of 32-bit libraries installed to even start the client.

Why would they prioritize resources into something with low demand..?

No hate but what is this even supposed to mean?

Because they are selling games on this platform today and the reasonable expectation would be that they properly support it. If they deem it too much of a cost then they can exit the market.

No, I meant that by setting the same bar for both platforms or by using same evaluation metrics. Supporting native software is trivial and everyone can do it obviously. How well does Linux on ARM support proprietary x86 software? Is it anywhere near as fast as Rosetta?

Steam for Linux is mixed 32/64, unfortunately the main executable (~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam) and its associated steamclient library continues to be 32-bit only and runs with a couple of horribly dated libraries in the mix. That process does pretty much everything aside from the UI.