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by ZeroGravitas 4576 days ago
You shouldn't think of OS X and Linux as two completely separate platforms in this regard, since they share a lot of relevant tech.

I would imagine the work put in to making OS X ports translates well to Linux and vice versa and it's the combined sales that people will consider when deciding whether to port (or what base technologies to build on for brand new projects).

As SteamOS takes off there's also the possibility of using Bootcamp to switch your Mac into a SteamOS machine if that gives you access to better GPU drivers (I believe currently some people do this for windows for the same reason) but of course you can play (mostly) the same Steam games library from either OS.

edit: a quick glance at Valve's site suggests 598 games for Mac, 253 for Linux and of those only 9 weren't also available for the Mac (they're all available for Windows).
2 comments
malandrew 4576 days ago
On that note are there any changes or improvements on the horizon that would let you fast user switch between two or more booted and running operating systems. It'd be great in the future if you could allocate a small chunk of your RAM to keeping the background machine in a chunk of RSm so it switches faster than you can switch between users on the same OS. E.g. Of 16GB of RAM, 12GBis allocated to the foreground OS and 4GB to the background. Then when you switch you get a near instantaneous switch and the 8GB difference is allocated to the now current foreground system as necessary.
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kilburn 4576 days ago
This can be done today using kvm's memory ballooning. Essentially, you install a driver in the guest VM and it takes care of (1) reclaiming RAM from the guest OS when the host OS needs more; and (2) providing more RAM to the guest if needed and available.
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keeperofdakeys 4576 days ago
While both may be Posix systems, the GUI, mouse and audio apis are much different - so there is still a lot of work you'd need to do. Since both use opengl though, you get rid of half the trouble by porting.

It's also important to remember that many game makers don't make their own engine, and so the engine must support OSX/linux (most classic linux ports have used the unreal engine, or source engine). Unity is quite good in this regard, you can hit a button to export your project to all three different platforms.

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