TLDR Someone doesn't think its worth it to replace his old laptop or learn new tech to support a tiny sliver of a microscopic partcile of a market.
If Linux and Mac ports paid for a house, I’d think he was making a decent enough income. Jobs that allow people to afford houses aren’t easy to come by, especially this decade.
It is more like "I make nearly all my money doing Linux ports and some extra money doing Mac ports, and the extra money was possible because most of my work creating the ports for Linux could also be applied to macOS" (or vice versa). "Now Linux and macOS have diverged so much - requiring different hardware and software - that the effort isn't worth the extra money anymore so I am going to focus on my primary revenue stream."
Also, the guy made it clear that he was struggling and he is one of the top indie game devs out there. Most indie devs are doing far worse. And as for just taking a corporate job: not as easy as it sounds. You hear a lot about a programmer shortage, but most of them want people with 5-10 years experience to take a contract job at entry level rates and they fully expect you to be very grateful if you can get even that. And an increasing number of these are being outsourced or being filled by the H1-B talent pool.
That so much of the Apple fandom could care less about the developers who are the ones that create the applications that make your iPads and Macs usable in the first place is appalling.
Don’t get angry at me, man. I’m not some blind Apple fanatic. Note I said jobs are not easy to come by...
TLDR Someone doesn't think its worth it to replace his old laptop or learn new tech to support a tiny sliver of a microscopic partcile of a market.
While the first part - not replacing his laptop - sounded strange, the second is an issue. As Apple has gotten bigger, they've moved away from open standards and created their own products. In this case, they've deprecated OpenGL (after not their version for a long time) and created their own graphics API - Metal. That makes porting much more work and less interesting - and as a long time Apple user, it's something I don't like too. It will make porting harder, maintenance harder and create more platform-specific bugs. It will also make less ports happen.
There’s a project to get OpenGL’s replacement Vulkan wrapped by/translated to Metal. It’s called Molten. It’s not yet complete (covering all of the Vulkan API), but it’s in progress.
As for Apple Silicon... I keep reading people saying that anything which compiles on Mac OS Intel is a quick conversion to Mac OS Apple Silicon. Is that not factual?
Interesting project.
As for Apple Silicon - it is as simple as a recompile if you have a simple app which consists of only its own code, and calls to the MacOS APIs.
If you have a large project, things can be way more work.... from "a little more" via "completely dependent on someone else" to "not happening".
Some examples of "dependent on someone else": "Pycharm", "IntelliJ" etc are nice developments suites. However, they run on top of Java - so you depend on that to be available for the SI.
Large projects often depend on a large set of libraries developed by third parties (or in-house). You need them to available as well... Some of them are available, some of them aren't, and some are available but only for newer versions of the libraries/engines than the ones you're using. Maybe it's a trivial change, maybe you need to rewrite parts of the codebase.
Perhaps he should port Linux to Apple Silicon and maybe the world will be right again
I hope you were being facetious. While this would be a convoluted way to turn an M1 Mac Mini into a Linux development workstation for his Linux games, it wouldn't do a thing for the entirely different stack on macOS.
macOS "stack" is what it is. If he doesn't want to develop for macOS that's a different issue no the one mentioned in the article. Guy just needs a reason to whine and doubt anyone will care and his ports will soon be forgotten.
Comments
Well look at that, didn't take long did it? https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/20/linux-is-now-fully-usable-on-apple-silicon-m1-macs
macOS "stack" is what it is. If he doesn't want to develop for macOS that's a different issue no the one mentioned in the article. Guy just needs a reason to whine and doubt anyone will care and his ports will soon be forgotten.