Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS

Don't say you weren't warned

The latest Steam client finally delivers on the warning from January, dropping support for several older OS versions.

The client update for Valve Software's gaming service delivers improvements for folks with recent versions of Windows, Linux, and macOS, but for users of older OSes, it's bad news.

The November 2024 Steam update delivers a mixture of wins and losses, depending on what you're running. There are the usual updates to the Chromium browser engine and lots of bug fixes. After quite a while in beta testing, Steam now has a built-in Game Recording feature, which allows players to save sessions and share clips with friends.

Native Linux games now run in the built-in runtime environment codenamed "Scout." Although Scout is labeled version 1.0, this replaces the older "legacy" Linux client. Native Linux titles run using Scout on SteamOS on the Steam Deck, so this change should improve compatibility on more conventional distros. It can also automatically drop back down to using X11 even if SDL is configured to use Wayland with the SDL_VIDEODRIVER setting.

From the start of 2024, Valve officially dropped support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, as well as for macOS 10.13 High Sierra and 10.14 Mojave. The Register reported on the change at the end of 2023, as well as an informed guess as to why: because the underlying Chromium engine was dropping support for these elderly client OSes.

Now it has come to pass. The new version of the Steam client won't install on anything older than Windows 10 or macOS 10.15 Catalina. That means Mac users can't run 32-bit games anymore, as all macOS versions from Catalina onward only run 64-bit binaries.

So if you have a well-specified older Mac, here is another reason to check out Open Core Legacy Patcher. For now, macOS 10.15 Catalina will do but we suspect it won't for long. This version of Steam uses the equivalent to Chrome 126:

Updated embedded Chromium build in Steam to 126.0.6478.183.

However, versions since Chrome 128 require macOS 11 or newer. For now, Catalina will work – but the next significant Steam update will update Chromium as well, and there's a high probability that that will drop support for 10.15.

So, if you're using OCLP to install a newer macOS, you should probably go directly to Big Sur. In The Reg FOSS desk's testing, we found that Big Sur ran reasonably well on a machine with Intel HD 520 graphics, although the same hardware ran very poorly with macOS 12 Monterey. Unfortunately, the inevitable end is in sight for older Macs.