Amber Neely
Using SteamOS VirtualBox, a Reddit user has managed to get macOS Catalina running at least in part on Valve's handheld gaming platform.
In a Reddit post spotted by The Verge, Reddit users Lampa183 shows off macOS Catalina running on the Valve Steam Deck.
Naturally, users were curious as to how well it performed on the tiny, 7-inch screen.
"Performance is normal. But some animations are [laggy] and turning on takes 2-4 minutes," Lampa183 posted in a reply.
The Steam Deck is a portable gaming console based on the AMD Zen 2 APU with four cores capable of handling eight threads, all associated with 8 RDNA 2 compute units. It has a base clock speed of 2.4GHz, with boost speeds of up to 3.5GHz, and is capable of playing desktop PC games at a relatively low resolution with acceptable frame rates.
Without hacking, the console has a serviceable Arch Linux desktop environment.
The laggy animations are likely because the user doesn't have any GPU acceleration active. It's not clear if that's even possible at this point.
For macOS users that buy the handheld, it's a good way to resurrect 32-bit games that macOS left behind several years ago
Sponsored Content
Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
1 Comment
I love my Steam Deck, and this type of thing is one of the reasons why. Not that I personally would ever install MacOS, or Windows for that matter, but the flexibility to do so is so bloody awesome.