We’ve seen folks install and run Windows OS on the Valve Steam Deck, but we’ve yet to see someone try to load some form of Apple’s macOS to run on the gaming handheld. Until now.
A hacker who goes by the name whatdahopper on X recently posted their efforts of transforming a Steam Deck into a “Deckintosh”, with the handheld running the macOS Sequioa operating system. At the end of the day, it recognises the machine as an iMac Pro.
with the help of some people (CorpNewt, among others), we got macOS going on the Steam Deck.
took awhile, but we figured out a fix to make OS's newer than catalina boot, and so, here is the macOS Sequoia recovery running on Steam Deck… pic.twitter.com/0PfqOGoQIp
— kaitlyn 🐇 (@whatdahopper) October 4, 2024
Now, there are a couple of things that we feel are important to note. First, the whole process of getting macOS Sequioa running on the Steam Deck is nothing short of impressive; you need to remember that the modder, along with a group, managed to get installed Apple software on to non-Apple hardware.
The second point does raise the “Why even bother?” flag – despite getting it to run, the Deckintosh cannot run any games, and that’s because it lacks GPU acceleration. The reason for this is that the Van Gogh APU isn’t currently supported, making any support for games impossible, for now.
However, the group says that it is optimistic about getting games to run on the macOS Sequioa-powered console, primarily because Apple’s RDNA2 driver support should theoretically work. At least, once the right kernel extensions become available.
