Would be fun if steam hid those from anyone who used those specific payment processors while still showing them to people who used alternative options - and then people started to disable those processors due to it.

As usual, if you want to make something for Mac, Apple requires you to make it FOR Mac, with several little things on top of just being able to run the game. And you need to pay Apple for the privilege of making something for their platform too.

Then there’s also all several tech stacks that they outright forbid even if it could run just fine. And many security layers you need to navigate and document in order to not got some random API call blocked that ends up breaking your whole code (something that you can’t even test properly because the blocks occur randomly and only when the game is downloaded from their [mandatory?] app store).

Most devs work with windows as their target platform and depending on their tech stack, supporting Linux might be as simple as running a separate build script (nowadays not even that as users can just figure out for themselves how to run the windows version of the game). Testing your game on your own mac (for a limited time) might be just as easy, but Apple adds so many extra layers to the process of releasing a game for their platform that in general it’s just not worth it.

There’s a bunch of people out there desperate for anything to play, but the best option for making your game run on macs these days is to add it to some service like GeForce Now.

Apple is constantly trying to shun gamedevs away from its platform, then from time to time they’ll be like “why won’t people make games for macs?” and do something like this to try to get them back, but shortly after it’ll go right back to screwing devs all over again.

I would try finding some de-bloated windows iso and try the VM route anyway. If your pc can run windows directly without much trouble, it should be able to run a lighter version of it on a VM too. You can dedicate most of your hardware resources to the VM and just no run anything else alongside it when you are working on an iPhone.

Some times you may need to install a few extra stuff to get a game to run properly, other times you may see a few visual glitches like a pop-up menu not rendering properly, but you’re unlikely to find any game that just can’t run on Linux unless the devs intentionally don’t want people to play it on Linux.

Check protondb for general compatibility of any games you play.

Sadly most times I needed one, I either didn’t know enough to be able to use it properly, or the PC was under too heavy a load that even the TTY was not responding.

Mint is often the most recommended distro, because whatever you may need to do in it, it tends to be easy-ish to figure out.

But these days I would strongly recommend in favor of some immutable distro like Bluefin/Aurora or Silverblue/kinoite. Instead of being easy to figure out how to do things on them, they make it so you won’t need to, ever.

It’s a complete paradigm shift and it might not be for everyone, but in the decades I’ve been using Linux for, I had never had such a smooth experience with any distro. Everything just works and you don’t need to think about the OS anymore.

However it won’t easily fit with some of the requirements you listed.

Nice! Earlier this year I skipped on a game I had been wanting for a long time, and I skipped it because of Denuvo. I might as well buy this one just to support the removal this time.