SteamVR Drops Mac Support

Now, that's just their VR headset, which is an extremely low-volume, 1% of the market gadget; VR's kind of awful in practice, but it keeps being "useful next year" for the last 40 years, and someday it'll be right. Steam as it is, >50% of the games I look at have a Mac version; it's not dead yet, but it definitely smells bad.

I blame Apple and their terrible support for gaming, in fact overtly hostile attitude. They like the PR opps at WWDC, and they like taking 30% gross profit of gachapon/IAP ripoff games made by Chinese clone factories, but never do anything after that, never provide game dev support on the platform, or put gamer GPUs in common hardware. They do not hire gamers or game developers, and they fired all the engineers in upper management, so it's just sales weasels left. And then killing 32-bit app support in Catalina just put a knife in any classic gaming.

The Mac used to be fun, a great desktop UNIX workstation which could also run a fair amount of games. Now, nothing works.

Elder Scrolls Online on the Mac is a pain in the ass these days, about half the updates make your camera spin out of control because ZOS doesn't have a Mac developer or any testing, either, they just rely on a cross-compiled build and push it out.

The suggestion to use Windows Boot Camp is just a giant middle finger, but what else are you gonna do?

Well. Given my plan to switch my workstation to FreeBSD when Mojave is EOL, I may accelerate that to this year, and have a partition for Windows just to play games. Which is stupid, but there you go, this is the dumbest, worst decade already just 4 months in, so why wouldn't computing be as bad as everything else?

Certainly anyone who uses Windows to try to do anything productive is… well, more masochistic than I am. It's just unbelievably awful and un-designed. I have a VirtualBox of it that I use for some testing, and it's like a 10-year-old read about CP/M, windowing systems, and bad middle management systems like stack ranking, coded it in BASIC and C, and then billions of dollars of business software and games were run on it. No part of that is a good idea.

Linux is so unbelievably awful; it's a half-assed server or embedded system, but not engineered for safety and reliability like a real UNIX workstation, the desktop is even more amateurish, and "business software" for it is comically bad. I'm not going to do that for a few half-working games.

But here we are. If I want to play games other than Animal Crossing, I suck it up and run a garbage OS as a partition.