There are a TON of native Linux games. So many awesome AAA and Indie titles alike. Truthfully, it would be wrongheaded to ignore how important it is that MacOS is quite similar to Linux. And I believe that has had a huge impact on Linux gaming as a whole.

Ethan "Flibitijibio" Lee, one of the most prolific Linux and Mac developers, has been working for NINE years porting over countless games for the alternative operating systems. He's one of the guys behind Humble Bundle's ports of indie games.

And so many of my FAVORITE native Linux titles have been ported to Linux by Ethan Lee. Fez, Escape Goat, Towerfall: Ascension, Transistor, Bastion, Owlboy, Celeste.

I mean, that's only a fraction of the games he's actually ported but even those on their own would be an impressive portfolio!

So yeah. You can say Ethan's been pretty influential in the Linux gaming world.

So when he posts an article on icculus.org about the future of Mac games, I took notice.

The way you would usually pitch a Linux version was by pitching a Mac version first, then you'd show them both builds and be like "lol, fooled you, they're actually the same!" That worked pretty well ~5 years ago, but these days it's not the best plan... the removal of their only standard graphics library (OpenGL) is the change everyone has already beaten to death. As they have diverged further and further away from open standards, the ability to build for one and then quickly build for the other has gotten less and less possible for developers who don't have a lot of resources...

Intel Macs will be going away soon, and Mojave is going to hit end-of-life this year... I've put it off for as long as I could, but after looking at Apple's trajectory vs. my own infrastructure for Mac support, it's looking like 2021 is the year that I have to say goodbye to the Mac as a primary target. This is a huge change that affects a number of my existing customers.

New games... will primarily be Linux (and Windows, if applicable) only.

Ethan says that the gateway to a Linux port is actually doing a console port, bizzarely enough.

The fact is, Apple moving to ARM will impact the entire computing world.

I made a video about a month ago asking if Apple's move to ARM would lead to Linux Desktop Dominance. In it, I mused whether other manufacturers would take note of the move and ship ARM-powered machines that would run ARM out of the box.

But there's another thing I didn't mention in that video. Fact is Mac and Linux were pretty similar. And that had an impact on the release of new Linux titles. And when Apple moved from OpenGl to Metal, that changed how developers like Ethan were able to port games.

So, too, will Apple's move to the M1 chip impact native Linux games. In his post, Ethan detailed that he would try to build Apple Scilicon binaries, since he suspects he'll have to start supporting ARM for Linux and Windows, too. But truthfully, we're entering uncharted territories here.

I suspect Linux is going to grow super fast, especially as ARM market share will start to pick up in the non-Apple laptop space.

But since Steam and all the games on it are built for x86, and not ARM, and I've yet to see a compatibilty layer like Rosetta 2 for Linux... we probably won't be seeing Linux gaming grow at the same rate. At least not on ARM devices.

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