Tech

They manage to run macOS on a Steam Deck

The Steam Deck It has given a lot of play since it went on sale a few months ago. At first, it was the users themselves who fantasized about the possibility of installing Windows on it. A little later, it was Valve itself that provided the tools to install the Microsoft system. However, users always want more. The one we are going to talk about today has installed macOS Catalina on your Steam Deck. Simply because you can.

Yes, it is possible to install macOS on a Steam Deck

On paper, macOS is a system designed solely for Apple-authorized Mac computers and servers. However, with the right tools, macOS can be installed on a regular computer. is what we call hackintosh.

But of course, it’s one thing to install macOS on a regular PC, and quite another to do it on a Steam Deck. This is what he has done user Lampa183who has shared on Reddit an image of his console moving macOS.

Lampa183 has only shown an image of the console running Apple’s operating system, no videos. However, he explained that it is not a conventional installation on the internal memory of the Steam Deck, but that he has achieved his goal through VirtualBox. In this case, VirtualBox is running on top of SteamOS itself.

It is useful for something? What performance does it have?

macos steam deck.jpg

If you’ve ever made a virtual machine out of your computer, you’ll pretty much get the idea of ​​how that installation of macOS Catalina works on the Steam Deck. As there is no hardware graphics acceleration, the usual thing in this type of virtual machines is that the environment works somewhat slowly, with quite long response times.

«Performance is normal, but animations are laggy and boot up can take 2-4 minutes».

In terms of utility, let’s focus on the fact that this type of installation is done exclusively to be able to say that you have achieved something that is impossible on paper. In case macOS had exclusive video games, they would not be able to move smoothly due to the lack of hardware graphics acceleration.

The community encourages you to take the next step

There have been many users who have pressured Lampa183 in his post to take the next step. Although the performance in VirtualBox is not all bad, the way to fix the graphics problem is perform a KVM type installation (Kernel Virtual Machine).

When we do a Hackintosh, we are limited to the hardware that Apple supports in their system. Today, that list includes Intel processors, some AMD video cards, and its own Apple M1 and M2 processors. As you can imagine, Tim Cook’s brand has never supported AMD APUs. However, with a KVM-type installation (Proxmox, VMware ESXi…), it would be possible to overcome these limitations. The real problem is that these are already big words. It requires time, a lot of knowledge about hardware and a patience that not everyone has, since it is a fairly long process of trial and error.

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