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”.
I think this is a sane choice for now, but this really should be a warning shot to the likes of Valve (to be clear, Valve is great for Linux overall, and I’m extremely appreciative of that), that 32-bit needs to go, and Valve cannot expect every single distro out there to maintain 32-bit support forever just for them.
Sooner or later they’re going to have to bundle a 32-to-64-bit translation layer, like they’re already doing with Proton, and also with their x86-to-ARM stuff they’re working on.
These maintainers are spending their own time and often money expecting nothing in return. If they don’t want to continue supporting 32-bit, they are fully within their right to do so.
I understand the fear of having to move distro, but some of the hate I’ve seen levied towards the Fedora maintainers over this is really vile. They don’t owe you a damn thing.
As long as the kernel keeps supporting loading and executing processes with 32-bit code, they don’t even need to go that far. There shouldn’t be much stopping Valve from just supplying libraries themselves inside a container. In fact, that’s what the Steam Linux Runtime “Sniper” does.
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.
Trust gamers to overreact and ruin things instead of being reasonable and finding a way forward that would benefit everyone, including the maintainers doing the thankless work of managing these distributions.
Boo! It’s a logical proposal
I’m not mad or anything. But I still do a lot with i686. If this happens I will just have to distro hop. Not ideal, but I’ve done it before. I just really like fedora and would prefer to continue using it if possible.
