In a different context, I was talking to someone who volunteers with an org that I also volunteer with. I shared that I really respected her ability to set boundaries because a pattern I've seen over and over again is this:
if someone capable comes to a non-profit that is relatively immature, they are asked to do more and more and more until they either burn out and bail or set hard boundaries. The non-profits need so much and there are so few who contribute.
It's great to help out, but setting and respecting boundaries is critical for your long term health and enjoyment of the activities you are helping with.
Yes, but when that happens in a company, there is at least the prospect of a raise and more impact.
As a non-profit volunteer you get props and the good feeling of helping people.
It's one thing if you don't work in any area with operational requirements that change over the course of a year but if you do then you need to have reserve capacity for new workloads even if the people involved are good at work.
I can play Fallout 3 and New Vegas on my M2 Pro MBP. I know that makes me a stereotypical Millennial, that I'm playing that and not the Fortmonth or whatever the kids are playing, but to me, the ability to do that really does cement that machine as the do-it-all machine. I can set up my workstation portably by having my MBP and my second screen on my iPad 10", do Python backend development easily, then kick back with Fallout at the end of the day. All with great battery life and cool running temps.
I'd love to have that capability formalized.
Nobody cares about that. Just play whatever you enjoy.
So it is bottle but for Mac? Never heard of it before. I used crossover once on a Macbook 2010 to Run Deus Ex,... anyway these are great projects. I guess booting linux from a USB stick should work on a modern mac too? rather than emulating it.
You can't boot Linux on Modern Apple machines.
Asahi Linux is working on it, they support M1 and M2 machines but not later ones.
Their disposition re Vulkan and Metal tells me all I need to know. Until that tune changes, I don't have any hope.
The more pressing concern is the eventual removal of Rosetta 2. It hasn't been announced so far, but it's unlikely that Apple will keep maintaining it forever.
Linux x86 emulators work around this by offering an optional reduced precision mode that turns those into either 64 bit or even 32 bit floats. Some even do it by default.
Microsoft also does that with their Prism x86 emulator. They can be somewhat confident in doing that as Microsofts compiler stack has defaulted to configuring the x87 hardware to use 64 bit floats.
Apple should really add that as an option to Rosetta but I doubt that's gonna happen simply because it only impacts 32 bit code.
I believe Valve is still sour from Apple discontinuing 32 bits x86 support and killing a big part of the Steam game catalog with macOS Catalina. It's not impossible to port Portal 2 to later macOS versions, there's a port for the Nintendo Switch so it runs fine on ARM.
Besides, the SteamDeck has finally opened the way to cut the OS middleman, why would they work towards that yoke again?
Are there CS 1.3 folks out there who still play this game (and on an Apple silicon Mac)? (I am not really a gamer; that's the only game I ever played and still like to play it from time to time; didn't like CS:Source/GO at all).
I reckon a lot of games on Apple Silicon would end up GPU bound before CPU bound.
When I run compilation and multithreaded integration tests on my chonky AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores, 32 threads) on Ubuntu 24.04, and on my 2020 M1 Mac mini (8 cores), *the mini keeps up*. It’s quite impressive.
There are some pain points that Apple could easily fix:
- Add a barrier API that more closely resembles that of Vulkan, which is easier to use and more flexible than both Metal and D3D12. Microsoft also basically copied the Vulkan barrier API in a D3D12 update but no games use that yet. The regular D3D12 barrier API can be implemented very well on top of the Vulkan barrier model but maps poorly to Metal.
- Open source MetalD3D and/or the Metal shader converter.
- Document the Metal shader bytecode format. It has been reverse engineered and it's mostly just LLVM bitcode anyway. Right now some tools like MoltenVK compile to Metal Shading Language (modified C++) which then gets compiled to Apple Intermediate Representation which then gets compiled to something the GPU can work with.
- Add a bunch of other Metal features like strict robustness guarantees (return 0 for out of bounds reads).
- Support optionally making specific folders in the file system case insensitive. The Linux kernel got support for that for Wine.
- Support the weird Windows NT sync edge cases in the kernel. The Linux kernel also recently got support for that for Wine.
- Add an API to Metal to allow mapping Metal buffers at a specific address in memory to help running 32 bit games.
- Add an optional reduced precision mode for x87 in Rosetta. (Turn the software emulated 80 bit floats into proper 64 bit floats).
From what I understand, Whisky only works with macOS Sonoma and Sequoia anyway.
Kegworks [1] works with Mavericks and Ventura, and WineBottler for Intel Macs.
That is specifically what it was designed to do.
What's the chance Codeweavers (makers of CrossOver) hires the maintainer? I've seen them post about hiring!
I often stumble upon docs for interesting things from searches and social media, and then sometimes have to Google by product name from very document page. It's just a small thing. I can't be alone here in that regard.
And, even if it did run effectively under Rosetta, its management interface won't even let you select a non-arm64 guest: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/topics/Introduction.html#h...
The D3D9 implementation in DXVK uses a Vulkan binding model trick to improve performance that MoltenVK can't handle.
Besides that, DXVK simply requires modern Vulkan features that MoltenVK doesn't support.