I am disappointed in some of the reactions this !! proposal !! has received, with some people apparently reading it in the most uncharitable way. It was a proposal that tried to address technical problems package maintainers and release engineering is facing, not some conspiracy to break the “gaming use case”.
things aren’t ready for this unless they wanted all the gamers to fuck off. Gaming on linux is a huge part of the already small percentage increase in linux use and a lot of people are just starting. Suddenly not having a bunch of games work or some not without advanced hurdles and probably being told it would be easier to pick another distro is too much for newbies who may just give up and go back to windows.
hopefully hopefully valve will move along with 64 bit steam and wine’s wow64 functionality improves before the supposedly inevitable no choice but to drop 32 bit release.
Steam itself isn’t the issue, it’s all the 32bit games. They could’ve done this move ages ago but didn’t because if steam runs, games have a chance of running.
Steam itself is an issue, to be clear. It’s unknown how much of a lift it will be to migrate steam from a 32 bit binary to a 64 bit. It should be basically zero, but who the fuck knows.
Sure. Steam just isn’t the big issue. They’ve already done a 64bit conversion. Steam for Mac is 64bit. Because they dropped 32bit support at macos 10.15 or so.
My guess is that everywhere else it’s staying 32bit to be a canary for 32bit games.