Which Operating System for 0.90 on Apple Hardware?

[Faster]

I've been away from KSP since 0.24 and just started trying to get an 0.90 installation going again under OS X 10.10.2. After a fair amount of time failing to find a stable modded configuration, I finally dropped down to bare-bones 0.24 and found it crashes and freezes quite a bit too (not nearly as much as with a dozen mods thrown in, but depressingly worse than 0.24.)

Anyway, to avoid the letdown of thinking the only decent game of the last decade or so is circling the drain, I wanted to see how folks are faring with other operating systems on Apple hardware, i.e., drivers. I can easily get this going under Windows 8, and with a fair amount of work I could get it going under Ubuntu. Is KSP stable under either of those while still on Apple hardware, stable enough in your opinions to invest time in getting it setup under one or the other?

Just looking for biased opinions and personal impressions, not a guarantee it will be perfect for me if I do spend the time.

[update]: Fixed title to clarify we're talking Mac's here.

Edited March 20, 2015 by Faster

[jarmund]

I've ran KSP without any major platform specific issues in both Win7 and linux mint 17.

The only thing i've noticed is the fact that i can't use the numpad properly on linux

I do have crashes from time to time, but they are rare despite the fact that i'm running 21 mods.

Can't be arsed listing my hardware specs, but it's a laptop that was somewhat above average around 2 years ago, so average-ish today.

Edited March 19, 2015 by jarmund

[Wanderfound]

No idea about Apple hardware, but .90 runs just fine for me on Windows 8.

Heavily modded, graphics cranked up, routinely left running all day long, crashes maybe once every ten play sessions or so. On a rather old and battered (but recently scrubbed and rebuilt OS-wise) not-intended-for-gaming laptop.

[theend3r]

If I wasn't so lazy I'd set up Linux just for KSP since the 64 bit version supposedly runs nicely under it. Windows + opengl somehow works for me but even one small mod more and it's unplayable due to crashes.

[Kersplattle]

I use (or try to) KSP on OSX 10.10.2 and it is currently unusable. System crashes repeatedly with kernel run-away (hmm, sounds like kerbal runway) processes that is much worse in .90 in 10.10.2. I'm inclined to blame OSX because I can get it to do this a lot even without starting KSP, though it could be a specific kext file from Unity or KSP causing the problem.

It's a fairly recent Mac too, late 2013 with 16 GB RAM and the updated GPU with 4 GB, when it works it handles pretty large craft without to much trouble, but the "when it works" part has become the problem just lately.

Still looking for some sort of solution as I am reluctant to go out and get parallels and a copy of Windows, but that maybe the best answer. I suppose I could try a Linux desktop with Parallels and see how that performs.

So I'd be interested in the same answer, by the sound of it either Win or Linux would work fine. Which Linux is recommended, vanilla Ubuntu ?

[jarmund]

....snip....

So I'd be interested in the same answer, by the sound of it either Win or Linux would work fine. Which Linux is recommended, vanilla Ubuntu ?

When it comes to which distro, just pick one that is fairly common. 90% comes down to personal preference. Personally i can't stand ubuntu, as i'm more of a command line user, thus preferring arch linux for most things. Currently running Mint mostly to test the distro.

Mint works fine with KSP

Ubuntu probably would too

And it wouldn't suprise me if Centos also did a decent job at it.

Plus a myriad of other distros that are oriented towards desktop and ease of use.

[Jouni]

Linux is the best choice for KSP, because it has a stable 64-bit version. OS X Yosemite is the worst choice, because Yosemite has some major compatibility issues with KSP. Mavericks works much better.

[AbacusWizard]

I'm running KSP on Mac OSX 10.7.5. Prior version ran just fine with only an occasional freeze, but .90 crashes all the time, especially when in the Vehicle Assembly Building (and when attempting to revert to vehicle assembly). I tried installing Active Texture Manager, which seemed to help immensely, but after installing a couple more mods it's gone back to crashing frequently.

[Faster]

I suppose I could try a Linux desktop with Parallels and see how that performs. [...] Which Linux is recommended, vanilla Ubuntu ?

I can give you a rough idea on the first: I regularly fire up Unity3D apps and sometimes the IDE in VMWare Pro (day-job includes Unity dev) and performance is abysmal, far worse than apps on other engines; it doesn't seem to like virtualization, but perhaps Linux fares better.

As for Linux, I believe Ubuntu is the officially supported version. If you're still partying like it's 1999 and have USB drives laying around, it's supposedly feasible to get a dual or triboot configuration with Ubuntu without pulling teeth. I'd have to hunt down a USB drive (do they still make those things? ) and am worried I'd then find the driver situation for Apple hardware (vis-à-vis KSP) is even worse than in BootCamp/Win.

At least it sounds like Win 32bit 0.90 isn't nearly such a disaster; hope yet I suppose.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm running KSP on Mac OSX 10.7.5. Prior version ran just fine with only an occasional freeze, but .90 crashes all the time. [...]

Thanks, it's good to know this unlikely some new 10.10 v. Unity issue. Sounds like KSP 0.90 v. OS X is just a (new) non-starter, too bad.

[Faster]

So I spent a few more hours working with the 0.90 on OS X 10.10.2 and it's just unusable; modded or not. Even got to wondering if aiming for 0.25 might be an option, perhaps a permanent one.

Anyway, I installed 0.90 on Win 8 Pro/BootCamp on the same machine (a MacBook Pro 11,3) and dropped in the whole mod list I was hoping for, all 67 mods, which I never thought would work. And, it's playing just fine--NASA almost finished their Mars committee meetings while I was waiting for KSP to load, but once done, it worked without issue. Again, on OS X, even bare-bones 0.90 was about as stable as the cat lady on PCP and it couldn't even load, never mind play, this mod set.

More annoying: I dug through the threads on this forum and it seems Squad ought to have enough data points to have pulled the 0.90 OS X version. It's not a very friendly thing to do, letting each player re-discover after hours of trial and error what you know--it doesn't bloody work.

Still curious to hear from anyone running KSP under Linux on Apple hardware...

[stibbons]

Check hardware compatibility very carefully before trying out Linux. The last time I looked the Linux drivers for the wifi adapter in my 2013 Air were very flaky. You'll want to look up your graphics hardware to see if there are decent 3D drivers for it, and if you rely on Thunderbolt devices I think you'll still have problems successfully hotplugging them.

[bobcook]

So I spent a few more hours working with the 0.90 on OS X 10.10.2 and it's just unusable; modded or not. Even got to wondering if aiming for 0.25 might be an option, perhaps a permanent one.

...

Still curious to hear from anyone running KSP under Linux on Apple hardware...

I play 0.90 on a MacBook Pro Retina Early 2013, 16gb RAM, 10.10.2. Really minimal mods. Zero crashes. Really, I've got many, many hours with zero crashes. Your experience is very different than mine. What h/w are you using?

[Varsi]

I have no idea what "apple hardware" means. As far as I know they are just regular PCs with Intel chipsets and processors and NVidia graphics if they're not using integrated Intel Graphics.

Having a lot of crashes shouldn't be a norm for KSP. Most of the time it seems to be caused by either running out of memory (4GB and lower systems) or modding a lot and running over 32bit program memory limits. I wouldn't completely close off hardware problems either but these days you'd have to have something pretty exotic to have trouble like that.

KSP writes a lot of logs from where one can try to figure out what is causing the crashes. We also have support sections on the forums. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have had similar trouble and have figured out how to fix it, some are eager to help out others too.

[ColourOfFire]

I play KSP on my 2011 Macbook Pro with about 15 mods. No issues whatsoever, just the occasional crash when switching buildings a lot and fast. First on OSX 10.6.8 (couldn't be bothered to upgrade), I recently upgraded to 10.10 as compatibility issues with other software were getting problematic, no issues to report yet. Haven't played much since the upgrade though.

[jarmund]

Check hardware compatibility very carefully before trying out Linux. The last time I looked the Linux drivers for the wifi adapter in my 2013 Air were very flaky. You'll want to look up your graphics hardware to see if there are decent 3D drivers for it, and if you rely on Thunderbolt devices I think you'll still have problems successfully hotplugging them.

A note regarding this: NVIDIA is usually a safe bet when it comes to linux compatibility, as they release linux drivers for ubuntu that can be used on most (all?) distros. These are the drivers i use on mint.

Other hardware can be more flakey, yes. I too had issues with an obscure embedded wifi module eons ago, but most are supported.

[Rune]

Well, I recently got KSP to behave very nicely under win8. PC of course, so I don't know how that will extrapolate to Apple hardware... but if it can run win8, I don't see why not, frankly.

The key was making in run in OpenGl to cut the RAM usage on half, and using ATM to slash the texture loading time and footprint (as if I needed that). I mostly don't use part mods, but pretty much every graphical mod and their mother runs smoothly on my game, and now that I know how to force antialising from the NVidia control panel (there are some issues with OpenGL), it looks just as awesome as DirectX.

Now if you run the vanilla game in DirectX? It still works, you have about 0.5Gb of RAM leeway for your mods before everything crashes out of memory.

Rune. But given the abundant memory leaks, 0.5Gb can last you about five minutes.

[Jouni]

The issues are probably related to certain combinations of Mac hardware, OS X version, and KSP version. My experiences are the following:

• A mid-2010 iMac (16 GB, Radeon HD 5750) was very stable with OS X 10.7 and KSP 0.22-0.23, as well as with OS X 10.9 and KSP 0.23-0.25. Upgrading to KSP 0.90 made the game less stable, but it was still playable. Upgrading to OS X 10.10 made KSP 0.90 unplayable.
  
• The experiences with an early 2011 MacBook Pro (8 GB, Radeon HD 6750M) were essentially the same, though I haven't tried it with the OS X 10.10 / KSP 0.90 combination.
  

[tater]

I'm running 10.7.5 on my i7 mac, no problems except for memory when a lot of mods are in (same issue everyone has).

[justidutch]

I have a 2nd generation MacBook Air, with OSX 10.8.5. 1.7 GHz Intel i7, and 8 GB ram. KSP .90 runs just fine, though I have no mods. It's crashed maybe 10-15 times in the 14 months I've been playing.

[yaur]

On a 2014ish iMac running ubuntu 14.0.4:

Getting Ubuntu to boot at all was a PITA (You need to be doing a UEFI boot to get SMP to work, headphone jack still doesn't work). Once its running, 64 bit KSP has fewer issues on Linux than Windows and 32 bit are unstable for both with my preferred mods loaded.

[Herbin]

Windows 7/ SteamOS. Stock. Never crashes on either. I built my compy.

[Faster]

Thanks everyone. To be clear for the non-Apple users out there: Apple does tend to use subsystems that began life on PCs, e.g., GT 750M GPUs, Intel Core CPUs, but they often put a little twist in there that can make for incompatibility and/or instability with vendor (not Apple) drivers. The big pieces tend to be fairly compatible, i.e., unmodified, the glue that holds them all together, far less so. They've done a fair job smoothing that over with the low-level stuff that BootCamp throws in the mix for Windows, but they do nothing for Linux and as many of us who use Mac's at our day jobs for dev work are actually Linux escapees, the potential user base for Linux-on-Apple is smaller than it might otherwise be--I want to go back to that like I want to drill holes in my ankles with a rusty bit.

A few folks asked what I'm using and that is OS X 10.10.2 on a MacBook Pro 11,3

Sounds like most folks are having OK times with 0.90 pre-10.10 OS X and maybe a few running OK with 0.90 on 10.10 with different hardware.

I can't see what's going on when KSP freezes, but nearly every crash is coming from malloc and I'm seeing stock KSP exceed 2GB of RAM pretty much out the gate, therefore any mods would quickly push it to the limit of KSP-OS X, which is ironically lower than on Win. Again, up to and including 0.24.x the OS X builds were plenty stable for an alpha (the 32bit nonsense withstanding,) it's only with 0.90 that I'm seeing this severe instability (note I missed 0.25 so it could have begun there.)

Anyway, I've already put a couple person days into failing to get 0.90 work on 10.10.2 on an MBP 11,3 and have no plans to continue that, especially since I see other folks in other threads saying KSP became unstable for them at 0.90. I'm finding Win 8 on BootCamp on this MBP to be quite stable and that it uses far less memory than the OS X build of KSP (not to mention having a higher threshold for OOM errors.) I'll keep an eye on Linux-on-Apple reports and if Squad hasn't fixed Win or OS X 64 bit by 1.0 then I'll roll up my sleeves some rainy Sunday and add Ubuntu as a boot option.

[Robotengineer]

It depends on what exactly you have. I have an iMac which I run Linux mint on, and it runs well. It took me a little while to install it, but it was definitely worth it.

[tater]

Faster: yes, any crashes I have are memory, and modded. It is lower than the 3.whatever people report being the problem on PCs. I could load it up on my PC downstairs and check, I suppose, or load it up on the wife's macbook and see as well.

[imax]

I run clean 0.90 on 10.10.1 without any problems on macbook pro 2012