Gavin Hird

But if I understand your messages right, my viewer still works for you both before and after the rollback?

It is a possibility that Rosetta 2 will be dropped from the next macOS together with OpenGL support, but we will only know when WWDC starts on June 5. As for plugins requiring Rosetta 2, that is probably a developer choice more than anything Apple impose on them right now. With the wast majority of new Macs being sold running Apple Silicon (all but the Mac Pro), dropping the Intel version of both software and plugins makes life easier for the developer, while it feels like a *****ty choice for the user of course.

Did you by any chance test my preview viewer build?

Not really, but they have hinted at Linux around 1%, macOS around 15% and the rest Windows. Of content creators macOS usage may be as high as 25%, but that too is just a hint and not a hard figure.

If they announce the Apple Silicon replacement for the Mac Pro this spring, chances are OpenGL support will be dropped from the next macOS to be announced at WWDC in June. This will be coupled with a major update of Metal, which only will run on the small selection of Intel based machines supported by Ventura and Apple Silicon based Macs. If the Mac Pro announcement is postponed till this fall, we will most likely see another year of OpenGL support.

As long as it is not supported by Apple, it can break at any system update. In addition it only supports a subset of Vulkan because there are some significant differences between the Metal it is translated to and Vulkan itself. The other difference is that Metal itself is a tile based renderer, which is a significant depart from the current and future Vulkan renderers.

What delusion are you under that it would perform 5 to 10 times better? Native code, be it regular code, Metal, video decode/encode is running damn fast on the Apple Silicon processors, and there is no performance gain to speak of to be had running Linux. Also, while Apple has actually done some good work to enable booting other operating systems on the AS Macs, the iOS and iPadOS devices has the boot manager completely locked down. Meaning there cannot be a Linux alternative on these devices.

Sure can do, but Mac users don't buy their machines to boot into Linux. So you would only catch an insignificantly small user base that way.

Don't have high hopes on that one. They are fantasizing about building a Vulkan based viewer on a framework Apple never will allow to run native on their systems, and which can break at any update of Metal Apple turns out.

It is awesome for video editing because the CPUs have dedicated video encoders/decoders, in addition to (very) fast storage and high memory bandwidth to memory closely integrated to the CPU. For other tasks YMMV, but the high single core performance makes them feel snappy, even for Rosetta2 translated apps.

There is only one Intel Mac you can buy new: the Mac Pro, and I would certainly not buy that for SL (or at all really). I was referring to current Intel Mac owners, many of which have machines that will still be a better fit for running the SL viewers than the M1/M2 machines.

The performance depends entirely on which Mac you compare with. It probably does better on M1 and M2 configurations than most of the Intel based Macs, but there are still Intel based Macs with better graphics performance than the M1/M2 Airs, MB, MBP and Mac minis. The high end Studios will most likely do better than any Intel based Mac with the exception of the 2019 Mac Pro, and the high end 2020 iMac. Fan noise is infinitely better on the M1/M2 machines.

I have used macOS since 1986 and never encountered any malware, root kit or virus on any of the Macs I have personally owned or the thousands I have managed. The only platforms that have real malware issues are Windows and Android.

There are absolutely no examples of malware for Linux are there? /sarc When it comes to macOS, a very large portion of the system is open source as well. For Windows it is pretty much close to ZERO.

The macOS version of my viewer preview builds are both signed and notarized. Windows version is not.

As if mobile users lets themselves being stopped by that? FB, TikTok, Insta, etc, etc are all miserable experiences.

Before that, the crash in Feb 2008 was epic. The grid just got slower, and slooower and slooooower, and was gone for 3 1/2 days.

You keep claiming it will never happen. Try again!

It would still need quite a bit of rework to work properly, but not least the backend databases to handle multiple large grids is a scalability issue in itself.

It you place a client in the iOS store, it immediately becomes available to 1.5 billion active users. Even if 0.1% of those downloaded and tried the client, it represents 1,5 million users, which easily could happen within days if hyped up by media.

Every mobile user needs a login slot on the servers, inventory, group, IM and other server resources more or less in the same line as a fully logged in users. The exception being if you only want to make a chat type of login, but that defeats the purpose of mobile users having kit in their hands which are as powerful as yesteryear's desktops and therefore could run a fully logged in experience.

Hypergrid is a way of horizontal scaling, but as you know Hypergrid is a mess when it comes to sharing data between the grids, so it needs a lot of work to be a seamless experience.

There is that, but the real reason for not advertising is that the SL backend is not scalable, so it becomes pointless to spend money on ads to significantly increase the influx of new users only to see the backend grind to a halt and the entire thing crash and burn. – Which happens to be why a mobile client distributed to millions would have the same effect. Hence it is not developed.

Could be. I suppose not everything is working as intended also on the beta grid with respect to the regular viewer. It will be sorted.