this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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No, you basically cannot use Proton on Mac to anywhere near the degree it currently supports games on Linux.
Long story short, they differ a lot.
Think of like... a bear, dog, and cat all have a single common ancestor if you go back far enough.
... But they are significantly different from each other in a wide variety of ways.
It seems that there are some semi-comparable ways to do more gaming on a Mac.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/02/07/proton-asahi-linux-mac-gaming-tutorial.html
Seems to technically work, but basically to me it sounds like where Proton on non-Mac baremetal Linux was around 4-5 years ago, ie, theres a lot of work to be done, but, some things work reasonably well.
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
Somewhat hilariously to me, many Mac/Tech media sites have described this as 'Basically Proton for Mac', which uh, no, its not, not even close.
Proton takes Windows hooks and calls and translates them in realtime to execute in realtime on a Linux system. Only non instant thing is building up a shader cache, but I'm pretty sure you do that on Windows too.
This... is porting a game.
Granted, it is impressive that any kind of automated tool/system like this even exists at all, but uh, this is more like a guided recompiling of the entire game binary to something that will run natively on a Mac.
So that is... not any kind of a realtime translation layer.
As best I can tell, results for how well it actually works are roughly:
Most of the time it does produce a valid, working game binary, but performance is often terrible for more graphically complex games.
I guess if any Mac users have more info or corrections to this, I'm all ears.
I know much more about linux and windows than Mac, so I may be missing something or innacurate.
Thanks for the information, I didn't know that much about the gaming scene in Mac. With the wine libraries being open source, I thought maybe Mac users would have a chance but the walled garden keeps stretching.
I mean, Proton is also open source and... its basically a giant extension/revision of WINE.
So, my guess would be that MacOS (OSX?) is so significantly different than most Linux distros, that you'd pretty much have to develop it to work with Mac libraries, whereas its currently developed and tuned to work with Linux libraries.