Kind of amazing that Steam is a 32 bit-only program on Linux, and everyone is making the Fedora project out to be the bad guy here somehow.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Steam is just one if the things that would break. It's more than just gamers pushing back against this.
I wish people would read the discussion on the Fedora forum...
Wouldn't the alternative be losing a LOT of old games on Steam?
There should be nothing wrong with a 64 bit program launching a 32 bit program. If anything, it sounds like Valve is using that as some sort of "comparability insurance"; if you can run steam, you can run almost all games on steam.
MacOS stopped supporting 32-bit with Catalina and, according to appleinsider.com, older games won't work on Catalina at all.
That must be on MacOS programmers. See WOW64.
Bazzite shutting down would be tragic ( for me ). I've been quite happy with it. Slowly convincing people to switch. Bazzite was also a relatively low step compared to fixing them a standard distro as all the stuff they want/need is already readily available.
Telling people I decided to promote another distro because the old one stopped is only going to make me have to restart my efforts with an additional hurdle ( how do you know this one won't stop ).
I tried a few distros. But I didn't like garuda very much, nobara was okay'ish. Bazzite really clicked for some reason, despite needing a bit of getting used to.
I'd hate to go distro hunting again. Or try and update cpu schedulers and not brick the whole system.
Oh no!
Moves to other Fedora based distro
Anyway.
You do realise that dropping 32bit libraries would mean all Fedora flavours get effected, right?
Can someone Eli5 egg 32 bit architectuur is still a thing? Why should Steam be still in 32 ?
Old games and software that will never be updated were built to run on 32 bit libraries.
Yeah, but I don't get that I'm ringing 64 bit since win7 and never had trouble running old games.
So why still run an is that is dependent on 32 bit?
Win64 contains a full Win32 system.
Aha. I see! Thanks for explaining.
The 32 bit libraries are still available for you to run that old software. If it was removed entirely those old games would not run
Followup question, if you don't mind! What still needs to be maintained on the Win32 system on behalf of the Fedora maintainers? If everyone has moved on from 32bit, and the old stuff doesn't change, where is the maintenance requirement? Could we not find a "final" version and leave it static, but still available in the package manager?
Is it that packaging requirements change for different systems to keep up with hardware drivers/new package managers/kernel removing deprecated features/security vulnerability patches?
If everyone has moved on from 32bit, and the old stuff doesn’t change, where is the maintenance requirement?
The problem is that it's not old unchanging code, people want the latest supported version so they can still run their 32-bit binaries with the latest supporting libraries.
And if the upstream developers don't consider 32-bit support important, then it falls on the distro maintainers to patch the code to keep it running in these situations.
That's essentially what has happened in some distros like Arch Linux where you have to explicitly install the 32bit versions alongside the 64bit versions.
Also, Steam provides some 32bit libraries exactly for this reason.
For one, its just a burden for maintainers to continue to make sure stuff still works with the presence of those libraries. Unmaintained software is increasingly subject to vulnerabilities, adding an additional burden for maintainers that cover off on the security aspect of packages. It also can hold back further development in other areas simply because they need to be able to install those older 32bit libraries.
The solution to a lot of these problems is containerisation, whereby you're effectively able to shift these issues off into their own area that has no affect on the rest of the operating system, but can be safely accessed when needed.
Idk how to feel about this.
Steamos is based on arch and also immutable. Can't they do something like that. Never liked bazzite cause it was fedora based. I feel like any gaming distro should be arch based and making it immutable would fix the arch breaking fear.
Why is everyone downvoting? It's not really a stupid question when they apparently already tried it.
Apparently they looked at it and had issues and bugs with arch which could not be fixed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1lj9oqw/comment/mzkxkz2
Building a distro is hard. Building a distro on existing architecture like uBlue is easier, but still hard, especially if you want to do it right. I believe uBlue was the right choice. This is just someone over in upstream doing something stupid.