Needs people to contribute to get to the point of running Safari, but the foundation is there.
Needs people to contribute to get to the point of running Safari, but the foundation is there.
The work is impressive, but I don't see a future where anyone manages to stay ahead of Apple and emulates macOS. Wine has decades of work, tons of support from companies with a vested interest in its success, and a clear need (running Windows games on Linux and Mac, running Office et al. on Linux). I am an inveterate macOS user and I don't see any benefit to a project like this for Linux. Who wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS? There's way too few people with this werid mindset to make a project of this scope viable.
> wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS?
Everyone who wants to do video editing on a Linux box. Or, in other words, everyone who doesn't want to buy and maintain a $$$$ apple machine just for occasional video editing. The same people who don't want to keep windows boxes running just because one random client needs them to use some random Windows only software
Most of those folks, in my experience, just have a Windows computer, or dual-boot.
I use the Photoshop part of my Adobe subscription mostly on a Mac, but I boot my desktop over to Windows if I need to use Premiere and After Effects because applying to those problems a GPU that weighs as much as my Mac does counts for something.
Or has a virtual machine running Windows. The performance hit is there, but for occasional use, it's quite sufficient.
Video editing falls into the category of running Office and the rest.
What’s wrong with running Adobe Premiere through Wine?
Oh and there’s way too few people who would want to video edit with Linux but Mac software. I mean there’s probably a hundred people on the planet, no joke.
Davinci Resolve runs on Linux.
Replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" and "macOS" with "Windows" in your post, and it is the exact statement I would have written ~2003 when I first played around with wine. Around 2004 I ran CS 1.5 online using wine on a linux box, and changed my mind. Today, in 2023, it seems like Windows games are better run with wine on Linux or macOS (the wine-bottles are basically sandboxed windows editions that I can create or scrub anytime I want). It is incredible how usefully sometimes software becomes 20 years later.
It's great we can run big games on Linux in 2023 but my laptop with a RTX3050 turns into a jet engine with ProtonGE and often drops frames, has to compile shaders, etc. I've used all tricks I could find to make this better. Some of it is lack of support, but it's mostly not as efficient to emulate things (shocking revelation, I know).
If you boot the same machine in Win11, it's silent playing most games, zero stutter, just smooth.
macOS going through the same means in 2043 they might be enjoying the extra heat dissipation.
Proton isn't an emulator, though shaders do need to be compiled which can be problematic when it's happening constantly. For many games there is next to no overhead -- some games even run better in my experience.
I've had the opposite experience but I'm glad people are having a positive experience in general.
To be clear, I'm really thankful this exists. It's has been super helpful not having to reboot into Windows so often but, in my experience, even with a lot of tweaking things aren't better than on Windows.
Maybe I'm a fan of games that hit all the issues in this page https://wiki.winehq.org/Performance
Even back in 2003, Windows had the two things I mentioned: games and Office. Wine might have been woefully inadequate back then, but people already wanted to run those two things on Linux. You lacked imagination in 2003.
Someday!
“…we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications.”
But not yet.
Yeah, I know I shouldn't complain but I've lost faith in this project.
Unrelated but is there any way to use Safari on windows?
You can either 1) run macOS in a VM, though I'm only familiar with running macOS VMs on Linux, 2) VNC into a real Mac, or 3) run Safari for Windows from 2012 [1]
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20231006225735/https://www.oldver...
Mac is a system of tightly integrated processes, so emulation requires the whole OS.
Windows games tend to be isolated all in one executables.
That’s generally not true.
Honest question, but why would you want this? Wine is obvious, there was a lot of software exclusively on Windows with no match on Linux when the project started, and that still is very true today for games.
While there certainly is a handful of exclusive software for the Mac, I don't see anything that would generate broader interest in this.
Hackintoshing. I don't want to buy a separate machine just to make iOS apps, but sadly I have had to do so. A few years ago I was able to run Windows, macOS, and Linux in Proxmox, it worked pretty well, but I'm not sure how long that will still be available as macOS moves fully to ARM.
There was a project aiming to do this called Etoilé OS[1]. Just went to the website and realized last update was in 2014 :/
[1]: http://etoileos.com/
I tough it was/is aim of GnuStep, while Etoilé was supposed to be `distrivution` of GnuStep with additional features.
This seems cool but I can't help but think it should be named Brandy since brandy is distilled wine and whisky is something different.
Fortified wine or Thunderbird would be a more accurate simile, I think
Port was what I was thinking. Can’t turn wine into whiskey. That’s not only impossible but grounds for a holy war between wine and whiskey aficionados
Plus it goes with the whole gaming port thing
Port - what an amazing name!
An amazing name that's also completely impossible to search for.
Yes, had i thought about it a minute longer...
Sherry, then. Or vermouth. Or any other fortified wine. It shouldn't be any more difficult to search for than whisky.
How about Winegar? Has “wine” in the name, and vinegar is essentially what wine ends up becoming after some time anyway.
Thought it was sarcasm... (sorry..)
Kind of already used by MacPorts (Jokes are already there for Port / Cask / Brew etc which would probably confuse things)
The dude is not old enough to drink yet, i think we can forgive his naming scheme, lol.
Drinking wine at 17 is fine in many countries. The US is probably among the strictest.
In a lot of countries, drinking wine is fine (as in legal) at ANY age.
It's the purchase that is so often regulated.
(And you're right, in many places the latter limit is lower than 18. For example in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Belgium, non-spirits like wine and beer can be bought from 16.)
The two (drinking age vs. alcohol buying age) often get confused, but consumption limits per se are actually pretty rare. (Assuming it takes place in private – laws regarding drinking in public are somewhat more common.)
He’s under 18? Impressive!
Haha tbh not a lot of thought went into the name, just went for a drink with a higher alcohol content, and I think Whisky is kinda catchier.
Maybe he's thinking about the story about how Queen Victoria used to find the claret at state dinners too weak for her, so would take a flask of Royal Lochnagar whisky to supercharge her wine.[1]
[1] https://scotchwhisky.com/whiskypedia/1888/royal-lochnagar/
Explains a lot about Queen Victoria. Made of sterner stuff!
I imagine being stronger than the base technology is what is being conveyed - ie. "wine is fine but liquor is quicker".
Pretty neat, but will Apple attempt to shut this down for redistributing GPTK?
I doubt it. But they will shut it down eventually, purely by dropping support for Rosetta.
I'm unsure that they'd actually do this. As I recall, the original Rosetta required Apple to pay royalties to IBM and it was basically only useful for Mac OS X binary compatibility. Being able to translate x86 binaries is somewhat more general in application and I don't think Apple is paying royalties on Rosetta 2.
Rosetta 2 expects certain capabilities from ARM CPU, which exists solely for the purpose of running x86 simulation. Apple will drop that in future versions of their SoCs and Rosetta will go as well.
You're speaking very authoritatively about the future plans of a company that is notoriously secretive about its future plans.
Do you have some kind of insider knowledge?
Or are you just claiming things to be definitively true that are, in fact, merely speculation?
Based on decades of historical precedent. Apple has migrated from 68k to PowerPC to Intel to ARM. You can no longer run PowerPC applications on current MacOS, as Rosetta v1 was dropped five years after migrating to Intel. Likewise 68k emulation was dropped some time after transitioning to PowerPC. Rosetta v2 is another temporary solution until x86 support is completely gone a few years from now, unless they intend to continue offering the Game Porting Toolkit.
Except that those situations were materially different from the current situation in two huge ways:
1. The architecture they're migrating away from is the dominant architecture in the market (both now and for the past few decades), meaning that rather than simply losing support for older MacOS software, they'd be losing access to easy virtualization of everything Windows and Linux can do.
2. The architecture they're migrating to is their own, 100% in their control, meaning that they can maintain hardware-level support for this translation layer without needing to convince any other company to put that effort in on each subsequent chip generation.
Now, does this mean they're guaranteed to maintain Rosetta 2 forever? No, of course not. I don't know what Apple's going to do any more than you or viktorcode do.
But it does mean that seeing this transition as being exactly a mirror of the past 2 architecture transitions they did is dangerous, at best.
Agreed that this is a different situation. If they drop Rosetta then Crossover is gone and Game Porting Toolkit is finished. Also Docker will be limited without x86. I'm using that to run SQL Server on Linux on MacOS for work.
This is an unprecedented situation given their new push into Mac gaming, seemingly trying to convince AAA studios that there is a market. If successful they can increase their user base and steal some thunder from Steam, and it probably bodes well for their Vision plans.
I'd say they have an incentive to not drop Rosetta until they reach a critical nexus of support from the studios... enough that it will cause the laggards to quickly add support once it's taken away. Maybe that will be there in a couple years, but likely it will take a bit longer.
Another argument for dropping Rosetta (2) is that it forces developers to make the transition instead of lingering in dependence of the translation. And if they don’t make the transition, get dropped by the wayside.
There is a cost to maintaining and keeping it functional as macOS gets updated. Apple doesn't care about legacy support or backward compatibility, so they will eventually drop it as they had dropped 32-bit support. I am sure Apple wants developers to view Rosetta 2 as already deprecated and to update their new releases to Universal 2 binaries.
What does this have to do with Rosetta?
Doesn't GPTK depend on Rosetta?
All x86 software being run on macOS relies on Rosetta 2. It effectively does a translation of x86 binaries to ARM binaries. Then, WINE handles the PE to mach-o translation along with providing a system call translation from Windows to *nix. Game porting toolkit then adds in macOS specific stuff as well as Vulkan and DirectX translation to Metal.
Vulkan? Are you sure? Last time I checked it was just only Direct 3D. For Vulkan there is only MoltenVK.
Most games don’t have an ARM version yet, so Rosetta lets you play x86 games.
Hi there, Isaac here. Early days of GPTK this was definitely a concern, so we required you to download the dmg from Apple's website yourself, but around beta 4, with feedback from the community, they changed the license to allow for redistribution in cases like this.
Since a few weeks I've been using the cheapest base model Mac Mini M2 which I got from a major german retailer for 650€ (all taxes included) brand-new. The gaming capabilities on 1080p are amazing and surprised me. I don't think there is any comparable WIntel machine for that price available (and within same form factor) with comparable gaming performance - mostly because available iGPUs are not powerful enough. I can see how that will change with the release of the new AMD Phoenix Desktop APUs, but we will have to wait if vendors bundle it into this slick, quiet, neat-looking machine that is the Mac Mini. Downside is of course, you have to mess with GPTK and Heroic/Whiskey, the UX is not nearly as slick as Steam+Proton on Linux.
I hope GPTK is just Apples first foray into gaming, they could release a trimmed-down version (less ports, no ethernet, no speaker) of a Mac Mini with a gaming focus and compete with PS5/Xbox on the price. But it needs better software UX for gaming just like Proton did for Linux.
I don't think there is any comparable WIntel machine for that price available (and within same form factor) with comparable gaming performance [...]
Check the Xiaomi RedmiBook Pros. You'd be surprised.
There are actually some devices that could complete on paper specs, like the Beelink GTR7 or other small form-factors. Problem is, they are made by some chinese manufacturers, and even though Xiami is not a small company, the build quality can vary, and availability is completely random. Especially the Beelink one with the AMD 7840 chips seems to be vaporware - there were youtubers and magazines reviewing it a couple of month back, but I was unable to find a retailer that actually has it, and it seems to have gone away from the homepage. They are also probably not very big on support and returns.
> I was unable to find a retailer that actually has it,
All these Chinese manufacturers are on AliExpress. There are many offers for Beelink SER7 with AMD 7840 chips.
I don't think they will be even close to the gaming performance since they only have Intel iGPUs. No way this does 1080p@60 for some AAA games from 2-3 years ago. And those models with dGPU are way out of the price range of the basemodel Mac Mini.
You need to buy from China, e.g. via AliExpress[1]. Xiaomi Europe only sells the Intel variants.
They have Ryzen APUs and additionally GPUs (the 2022 model had Nvidia, this year's has AMD).
I have the 2022 15" Pro version and its a beast.
I do hope that between M-series SoCs and AMD APUs, it becomes normal and expected for mainstream computing devices across the board to have reasonable graphical capabilities without the unavoidable heat, power hunger, and added cost of a discrete GPU. There’s not much reason for iGPUs to be as weak as we’ve become accustomed to with Intel CPUs.
The benefit from this happening would be twofold: it gives a much wider spread of users access to hardware that can deal well with moderate graphical workloads and it provides a common minimum spec for game devs to keep in mind that’s actually powerful enough to deliver a decent experience (as compared to now, where iGPUs are near writeoffs for anything but esports titles).
> not much reason for iGPUs to be as weak as we’ve become accustomed to with Intel CPUs.
It requires more silicon which will increase power consumption and require more heat dissipation... same issues with discrete GPUs. Where would the additional performance come from?
Somewhat powerful iGPUs do require more silicon, but the design of that silicon is going to differ compared its discrete counterpart — whereas discrete GPUs are typically designed for most performance possible with the least silicon at the cost of heat and power usage, iGPUs are designed for perf per watt, as seen in Apple’s M-series SoCs. There’s probably some energy savings to be had from the GPU sharing system memory and moving data around less.
On the software side of things, iGPU drivers tend to better optimized for efficiency compared to discrete GPU drivers, where that’s almost an afterthought and in some cases broken (like the laptop I had where the sleep state in the drivers for its Nvidia card was broken for years).
Much props to the maintainers for making this available at all, but I gotta say that as a user (gamer), the experience is a pain. Some games work, sort of, after a lot of configuration (often with outdated instructions, https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/Game-Support. Many games don't work at all, or only work on some platforms (e.g. Battle.net but not Steam for Diablo 4). Dozens of issues remain unaddressed: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues
I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified.
In the meantime, I find that GeForce Now (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/) provides a much more seamless, one-click-and-play experience. It works every time and doesn't break on every update, etc. Its primary downside (aside from a very reasonable monthly subscription fee) is that it has a relatively small game library, with only a subset of Steam/Epic/Xbox title available to play. But of the games it supports, it provides an overwhelmingly better experience than Whisky, GPT, or even native Apple Silicon gaming. The 4080 is dramatically more powerful than even the highest end Mac, and running it in the cloud means no local noise or heat, and much much better battery life. For anyone interested in actually gaming on a Mac without headaches, with good graphics and a good framerate, I'd strongly recommend GFN and just ignoring the ports or emulation layers. It's just a much better experience.
I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified.
Valve cooperated with Codeweavers, the makers of Crossover, to build Proton. And afaik Apple „works“ with Codeweavers. Well at least they don‘t get in the way to incorporate GPTK into Crossover. Apple changed the licence of GPTK so that Codeweavers can include GPTK.
Good point! Have you had any experience with CrossOver? Does it tend to work better than Whisky?
Part of the nuance here is that although both can use GPT underneath, there's still a lot of config that needs to happen beforehand (e.g. different "sync" modes that impact not just visual fidelity, but whether the game will even launch at all). Does CrossOver take care of all that for you (with predefined pre-game profiles, perhaps) or do you still have to manually configure every title?
Not in depth. I’m just a user of Crossover, I haven’t had time to try Whisky. I think sometimes Codeweavers incorporates fixes for certain games into the app updates. Especially for the Steam app, for example. These appear in the changelogs. I use Crossover with CXPatcher because I then can use more up-to-date versions of DXVK and GPTK. The update cycle of Crossover is a bit slow for what is going on in that space right now.
The biggest problems I've run into with gaming on Linux/wine/proton whatever are DRM getting upset about something.
Give GFN a try. No DRM issues.
Good point! Have you had any experience with CrossOver? Does it tend to work better than Whisky?
It certainly does. It has presets for most mainstream games and it uses the latest version of Wine.
The author of Whisky, in a move that can't be praised enough, has decided to not update further the version of CrossOver on which Whisky relies. This is so that Whisky does not become a free clone of CrossOver, given that CodeWeavers are the ones developing Wine. So, I'd say it is worth using CrossOver! They also have a free trial, so I'd give it a try and compare it with Whisky for a specific game, and see what runs better!
I think a recent beta of Crossover incorporated a GPTK version before it was released by Apple so that seems promising.
I've been following the scene of Mac gaming for a while. Isaac, the author of this project, is someone who contributes a lot to this space. He created Whisky and contributed to Ryujinx, a Switch emulator that works on Mac, and Playcover, a way to play iOS apps and games on Mac. Also, he's still 17 years old. [0]
This is a tiny detail but boy do I appreciate that he actually bothered to use the real toolkit (AppKit, SwiftUI, whatever) for the GUI… I am so, so tired of projects like Docker Desktop that cram basic UI's into Electron and think that's somehow "fine."
Thank you, Isaac. The details matter.
If you target latest macOS that's an easy choice.
Using AppKit to support older versions of macOS is not particularly difficult.
Electron is probably cheaper to inplement and works - sadly chrome under the hood outgrows it in resource hungriness
You get what you pay for, I guess.
AppKit (or swiftui I guess) is fairly simple. IB makes having a correctly behaving UI super easy - far more so than jumping through CSS hoops, and your app will behave correctly on macOS, which electron apps do not.
Electron apps are only easier if you don’t care about good UI, just “cheap cross platform”. It’s even more obnoxious when many of these “apps” can be loaded in safari and then interact properly with the rest of the system.
Electron apps are lowest common denominator apps where the primary goal is cheap rather than good. There is no user facing metric by which an electron app is superior to a native one: they’re slower, bigger, and use vastly more memory, and result in drastically worse battery life.
Hi there, it's been wonderful reading everyone's comments!
I’ve been using Whisky for a month or so to play Hogwarts Legacy on my M1 Max. Lots of fun. Performance is fine. The M1 Max is definitely not a 4090, but it’s nice that I can play the game at all!
How many FPS do you get?
From a quick search suggesting somewhat relevant results:
- Using AMD FSR 2 to upscale a 1280x720 render target to 1080p, and all graphic presets set to low they benchmarked ~42 FPS on M1 Pro and 47 FPS on M1 Max.
Around the same ish ballpark as with a GTX 700 series dedicated GPU, released 10 years ago. And around twice the performance of other integrated graphics of other modern CPUs.
At those settings I'm getting about 40 fps. If I bump it up to ultra I get about 32 fps. If I go for retina (2304x1490 upscaled to 3456x2234) I'm down to 25fps, and when I step inside a building I get around 33fps.
The graphics settings to ultra, and retina, you manage 25fps? With FSR perhaps? That's still very impressive if that's the case. I assumed the performance penalty would be severe
Edit: I saw your comment in parent thread.
There are multiple translation layers in between the game and the GPU. I don’t think this is a fair comparison.
Indeed. I think I only mentioned it because of the original reference to it not being a RTX 4090, with a somewhat adjusted perspective of what performance it is closer to.
I'm getting around 25-30fps at ultra with AMD FSR 2 set to quality. Not great, but perfectly playable for me. In Whisky I enabled "Retina mode", otherwise it runs at 1/4 resolution.
How is this different from CrossOver?
It’s just an easy way to get started with GPTK. Crossover has support for GPTK now too, so you can use that if you want.
Didt things got better lately? I had very limited success with crossover circa 2021. And that's from a point of view from someone who have no Windows actively running on personal devices. Comparing to what I get in my Linux AMD GPU machine crossover seems to be not as good.
CrossOver now supports the GPTK, which lets you run DX12 games.
Does Crossover use the native Mac interface tools?
Yes, it’s entirely AppKit.
They have a handy-dandy little comparison table on their Wiki. [0]
[0] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Gui...
Wine for apple and they called it whisky?
Cider should be the name.
Cider was the name of a commercial port of Wine to Mac by a company called Transgaming.
:c
beer => whiskey
wine => brandy
Quite a few projects already with Cider as their name, so I decided against it.
Wine, fortified with the power of porting? I should say Port was a perfect name.
Portwein?
I prefer Heroic Game Launcher. It detects GPTK if installed and compiled via homebrew, but also has a built in downloader for different wine binaries (crossover or verbatim wine). You can set each wine runtime for each game. Plus, Heroic can login and download your Epic and GoG games.
What about Steam?
Doesn't support steam to my knowledge, that's where Whisky comes in handy.
Sounds like you don't really "prefer" it so much as you don't have any need for it, but would indeed use it if you were a Steam user. That correct?
Probably correct, I am a steam user of course but I always prefer to buy games on GoG (because of the DRM-free situation). And possibly because a lot of my steam games already run on Mac natively.
Just found this a few days ago, looks like a nice start, but less developed (so far) than some of the others. I landed on Wineskin for my usage (playing AoE2) as i found it most understandable. Also check out Porting Kit for click and play.
The other thing is Wineskin using CrossOver as its main engine now performs so much better than vanilla wine.
Yea and it offers a newer crossover build than whiskey, not sure why whiskey isn't using the latest open source version available
I for the life of me cannot get AoE2 to run on my M1. Somehow always desyncs and/or jitters.
Interesting developments in this space. So how does this work in practice? Do I feed it an ISO? Are Steam games supported?
Steam games are sadly very hit and miss. In my case more misses than hits.
Yeah. I hesitate to be harsh on a volunteer project. It’s clearly got a lot of brilliance behind it. But yeah, all the games I tried today failed to run unfortunately.
On the other hand, the Steam launcher itself somehow runs faster via Whisky than the native Mac version.
It's good to realize that the Xbox design uses virtual machines. Every game is its own VM, with its own OS.
Check out this interview with Dave Cutler by Dave Plummer: https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?si=9Gh0G-zFh0hX89cA&t=7394 (from 02:03:00)
Oh, and if someone can lipread, the audio mutes at 02:06:55 :-)
Ive wondered for a while why (yes I know, piracy and security) we can't get Xbox subsystem for windows
Neat but... how do I use it? (Currently I'm clicking random things until something interesting happens.)
edit: found a guide on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Gui...
Download the windows exe file for Steam and run it from the run button in your flask.
Thanks, that's even easier than what I was initially trying (force downloading Windows games via the Steam CLI on the Mac side)
I would love to see a table with level of support and framerate for a few CPU's here. I know it depends on contributions but I think the community would be happy to do so if this takes off.
r/macgaming has had a number of these.
Personally I've had very little luck getting much of anything to work, though.
Does this trigger any virus alerts?
There is a known false positive involving Avast https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues/465#issuecomment...
Can someone familir with the scene comment on how this compares eith Crossover?
Afaik it has a one-version-behind (to still let crossover have some edge and ger money that lets them develop it further) crossover inside.
The Apple Gaming thing is the only thing that keeps me tempting to switch to Sonoma, even tho the rest of it is so bad and worth it.
I just tested it and it ran CS2 at 120fps on online servers. All I had to do was install Steam, then installed CS2 on Steam and ran the game.
mind blown that we can get this type of performance knowing how many hops are involved to get this to work (Rosetta2, DirectX -> Metal etc).
I hope these type of things give AAA studios the motivation to check out Apple Game Porting Toolkit.
I am pretty pleased with it. It has its own set of nuances, but it is simple and works quite well with my needs so far.
these projects are assaulting my sobriety
Why don't we ever get the opposite? I want this but a MacOS emulator (really a library implementing the MacOS apis), so Mine, not Wine. Allowing me to e.g. run Safari on Linux.