Fedora proposal to drop 32-bit support has been withdrawn

2038 is the hard cut-off date for 32-bit applications. After this date, 32-bit applications will not be able to measure time accurately

So, basically, the Y2K problem all over again? I must be really out of touch -- I didn't even realize this problem existed. That being said, 32-bit systems can still use 64-bit numbers. Odds are pretty high, though, that the default was to use 32-bit numbers on 32-bit systems. Just like with Y2K, adjustments to existing software are going to be needed ...

Fedora can't just drop the ~9000 packages that have nothing to do with Steam because of the way their build system is made.

I got that sense as well. It would take a great deal of study and careful planning. I think that one of the goals of the proposal was to get the ball rolling on that process.

Native 32-bit Linux games not being playable on Linux is an overblown issue. The fact is, most of them are not playable even with Steam Runtimes in my experience. Proton is the better choice in most cases.

I tried to argue that "Proton may be a better choice than Native" a year or so back on this site, for this reason. The hostility I got as blowback was palpable.

There was also some amount of civil discussion and quite a lot of good points raised. I think this change proposal was pretty successful in that respect.

Once I got around to reading a bit of the thread, I thought so too.

Hopefully, when they decide to revisit this problem, they will be a little clearer on the goals of the new proposal -- particularly avoiding short soundbites that can be exploited by the clickbait sites and YouTubers. We all know that this issue will need to be revisited again at some point.

tldr: We pulled an Ubuntu, got Ubuntu backlash, we now pretend that it didn't happen until the next pre-release.

I actually do not understand the arguments till this very day. I validated my previous claim on how am I running a 64bit only distro and it turned out to be true. Yet Steam works just fine even old 16bit Windows games via 32bit Wine as 64bit Wine can not emulate Win95. As well as any old unmaintained 32bit native Linux game (Unreal Gold, UT2004, The very first SDL Port of Quake called Fitz Quake just to name a few). All thanks to flatpak running either Bottles, Lutris or Steam.

I've read multiple times "Flatpak Steam has it's own set of issues": After many years running the flatpak Steam I still questioning, which are these issues everyone talks about? I am sure I must have had run across them by now shouldn't I? Yes I've read some (mean while years old news) about how the flatpak sandbox interfered with the Steam runtimes. But those where fixed long ago.

Actually, even though this is a personal perception, the Flatpak Steam worked much better than any "native" Steam ever has. Be it the *.dep shipped by Valve or any native package shipped by which ever distribution I had ran it on.

Therefore from my personal point of view. I do not understand how removing 32bit form the base OS kills gaming? It clearly does work. As well as for the other 7.42% of Linux Steam users running the distro "Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit". Which leads me to the conclusion the host does not need to still maintain 32bit libraries if flatpak seems to be capable of handling all this already?

Can some one please enlighten me. With sources / proofs preferably? I know I did not provided "proof" or sources myself. Beside not understanding the discussions.

All I can give is a list of all installed packages and the huge lack of anything "-32bit" as this is what openSUSE does label their 32bit packages: https://gist.github.com/VortexAcherontic/cc550a5b33b03c0fc7bdef1874b02947 Especially there is a lack of 32bit nvidia driver stuff which otherwise would be vital for running 32bit games. But neither are nvidia-compute-G06-32bit, nvidia-gl-G06-32bit or nvidia-video-G06-32bit installed. As well as no libgstvulkan-1_0-0-32bit, libvulkan1-32bit or Mesa-vulkan-device-select-32bit.

Yet Steam runs fine: https://i.ibb.co/zh43QKtv/grafik.png

It is not fair to bash Fedora or the FESCO on this proposal. The world moves on. Most 32bit software (except Steam) is probably out-dated and unmaintained anyway. Shouldn't it be the preferred approach to run them via Flatpak to have at least some sort of Sandbox they run in rather to compromise the base OS with old libraries and stuff?

Or do I fundamentally misunderstood here something? I mean it, please I'd really like to understand this.


Last edited by Vortex_Acherontic on 30 Jun 2025 at 5:30 pm UTC

@Vortex_Acherontic

I actually do not understand the arguments till this very day. I validated my previous claim on how am I running a 64bit only distro and it turned out to be true. Yet Steam works just fine even old 16bit Windows games via 32bit Wine as 64bit Wine can not emulate Win95. As well as any old unmaintained 32bit native Linux game (Unreal Gold, UT2004, The very first SDL Port of Quake called Fitz Quake just to name a few). All thanks to flatpak running either Bottles, Lutris or Steam.

[...]

Therefore from my personal point of view. I do not understand how removing 32bit form the base OS kills gaming? It clearly does work. As well as for the other 7.42% of Linux Steam users running the distro "Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit". Which leads me to the conclusion the host does not need to still maintain 32bit libraries if flatpak seems to be capable of handling all this already?

[...]

Can some one please enlighten me. With sources / proofs preferably? I know I did not provided "proof" or sources myself. Beside not understanding the discussions.

[...]

Or do I fundamentally misunderstood here something? I mean it, please I'd really like to understand this.

How do you think Flatpak "solves" the problem of running 32 bit games? It contains the 32 bit libraries! So, the problem is not different, the libs are still needed and still need to be maintained and still need to be packaged!

Getting flashbacks to the absolute shitshow 2 years ago when Fedora had another brilliant proposal that people went to war over, I thought I recognized Fabios name from the discussions. If you forgor, perhaps purged your memory banks or just live under rock-sized boulders, you may interwebsearchnaningans the following: F40 Change Request: Privacy-preserving Telemetry for Fedora Workstation (System-Wide)

Yeah, no. This guy can't convince me he could not see the big picture with the SteamDeck, EoL for Win 10 etc.

And his attempt at an excuse for picking 44 instead of something reasonable like 48 or even 50 kinda confirms it for me. He knew what he did, and knew how it would be perceived, he wanted the drama.

Watch your step around here, this topic is hot lava

I think it is good that this discussion was started up again. This will eventually need to be addressed, and I understand there is a lot of overhead as a result of continuing support for it. The reality is, there are a lot of people who would be immediately left in the lurch and quite a few people having to pick up a lot of work they are not ready to do. I would have very much liked to have seen a list of core apps and features, top 100 list, that would stop working if not converted by maintainers. I think this would help paint a much clearer picture of the impact. The fact that Wine and Steam are called out directly in the proposal seems like it's pretty clear it is mostly games.

That's a relief, even if it's temporary. Hopefully the Bazzite team will rebase their distro - at least that's something that might be possible now. Arch seems the perfect match and a safe haven for gaming, as it's even backed by Valve. It would be a shame to see this project disappear.


Last edited by Penguin on 30 Jun 2025 at 7:26 pm UTC

This was just a proposal, it was just a space to discuss and come up with a solution for a problem which needs to be solved sooner or later.
In the meantime this could be used to put some pressure on VALVE to at least start working on port to 64.

good, no need to drop it and be anti consumer.

How do you think Flatpak "solves" the problem of running 32 bit games? It contains the 32 bit libraries! So, the problem is not different, the libs are still needed and still need to be maintained and still need to be packaged!

Yes but the Fedora proposal was to remove 32bit from the base OS. Nobody was talking about removing 32bit from flatpak.

Therefore I do not understand why everybody freaks out here. Nobody is in fact taking the precious 32bit apps away from anyone. But instead of running them natively ppl may want to finally adopt flatpaks?


Last edited by Vortex_Acherontic on 30 Jun 2025 at 10:13 pm UTC

This topic probably needed to be broached in one way or another. But this guy seems either foolish or insincere to me. He "wasn't expecting" the reaction he got, and it's just sooo unfortunate that people were mean to him? If he genuinely wasn't expecting it, he's an idiot, because it is completely obvious what the reaction was going to be, right down to it being exactly the same reaction Ubuntu got for exactly the same reasons a while ago. So OK, if that's the case then hopefully now he's learned something.

But if he really wanted reasoned responses that didn't take sides, he had an option. Rather than saying "I propose that we wholesale rip out this stuff a lot of people depend on", which is what he said, he could have said "Maintaining this stuff a lot of people depend on is difficult the way we do it, is there some way we could arrange for users to still be able to do what they want to do, but with less overall maintenance effort?"

But he didn't do that, so he got the response he asked for. His snidely bitching about it now seems disingenuous to me.

The question isn't whether we should get rid of 32-bit support. We absolutely should for the many reasons listed.

The question is, how do we get rid of 32-bit support in a way that doesn't inconvenience end users? To that end, there isn't an acceptable solution yet.

One of the big road blocks is, indeed, the Steam client, and secondary reason is 32-bit games that can't run in a 64-bit environment.

I'm no expert in this sort of thing, but couldn't there be a conversion layer (not unlike WINE) that would allow 32-bit applications (games) to run in a pure 64-bit environment? We can do it with x86/amd64-to-arm64, so what is the technical reason it can't be done with x86-32 to x86-64?

couldn't there be a conversion layer that would allow 32-bit applications to run in a pure 64-bit environment?

I think the decrease in performance would be quite tangible. As I recall, IA64 had some kind of 32-bit emulation *in hardware*, and it got absolutely smoked by AMD64, which had native x86 support. The Itanic is no more, and Intel makes AMD64 CPUs.

Hmmm... apparently the hardware support was so bad, Intel ditched it for a software emulator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32_Execution_Layer


Last edited by Phlebiac on 1 Jul 2025 at 5:46 am UTC

Yes but the Fedora proposal was to remove 32bit from the base OS. Nobody was talking about removing 32bit from flatpak.

Don't you think Flatpak will face the same problem as Ubuntu and Fedora?

Therefore I do not understand why everybody freaks out here. Nobody is in fact taking the precious 32bit apps away from anyone. But instead of running them natively ppl may want to finally adopt flatpaks?

Well, as you asked for "want": No, I don't want. :)
(And as I'm running Debian, I don't face the lib problem (yet), it's got about all libs compiled for 32 bit.)

If you visit Steam for Linux forums regularly, you see people having all sort of problems with Flatpak, like no access to other hard drives or the microphone not working. I'm sure this all is solvable, but it does create additional problems for people that the "pure native" (I'm missing a good expression here.) version does not have.

I think the decrease in performance would be quite tangible. As I recall, IA64 had some kind of 32-bit emulation *in hardware*, and it got absolutely smoked by AMD64, which had native x86 support. The Itanic is no more, and Intel makes AMD64 CPUs.

There could be hope that 32 bit games are so old that that's still fine?
They're written for computers > 10 years old, I guess?

>2038 is the hard cut-off date for 32-bit applications. After this date, 32-bit applications will not be able to measure time accurately.

At least we know about this so far in advanced, and since it's Linux it likely won't blow up on the news or anything and create public panic like Y2K did. I was 15 when 2000 happened and it was insane how much end of the world stuff was going on to do with Y2K that ended up not happening. Never want to go through that again.

@Leahi84

I was in the retail computer industry at that time. I kept having to reassure customers that the computers we were selling were not affected by the problem. I could not believe how the media blew things up completely out of proportion. But, then, given the media's behavior since then, I am not all that surprised anymore.

Don't you think Flatpak will face the same problem as Ubuntu and Fedora?

Why would it? That's antithetical to the concept of Flatpak itself. The purpose of it is to provide sandboxed environments for applications that contain the exact dependencies they need. These dependencies are not installed to the system resources directory (/usr) like typical libraries, and it would make absolutely no sense to disallow the use of i386 libs since they aren't actually touching the base OS. Also, the other things you described are trivial problems to work around. The Steam forums are going to be filled with Windows users, so of course they're not going understand it. If they had any semblance of understanding, they wouldn't be asking for help on the Steam forums. Y'know, a traditionally unreliable source of technical information.

Don't you think Flatpak will face the same problem as Ubuntu and Fedora?

I do not understand what you want to say by this? You mean removing 32bit support from flatpak?

Well if this should ever be the case. Then I would agree with all of your denying the removal of 32bit. For me Flatpak is all about compatibility. But I do not see this happening any time soon (hope this will age well). But forcing every distribution to drag around 32bit libs just for Steam ... I don't think Valve should be allowed to hold us all hostage with this.

I mean they [Valve] can do 64bit. Apple already forced them to do so for MacOS as they nuked 32bit a long time ago (With no compatibility, Linux at least has it)

If you visit Steam for Linux forums regularly, you see people having all sort of problems with Flatpak, like no access to other hard drives or the microphone not working. I'm sure this all is solvable, but it does create additional problems for people that the "pure native" (I'm missing a good expression here.) version does not have.

No surprise this is what a sandbox is suppose to do. There are indeed ways to solve this.

a) Valve to update Steam to make use of Protals or
b) To grand the missing access using Flatseal or KDEs build-in application permission tool

The first one would not just make it work more streamlined with Flaptak but also make it much more distribution and desktop environment agnostic.

While other than grand access to additional drives I never had any interferences with flatpak as a whole. Mic, Webcams, Capture cards, Stream Decks etc. do work fine though.

I think this whole discussion would be a lot more calm if ppl would have adopt Flatpak at a larger scale and therefore knew how to use it.


Last edited by Vortex_Acherontic on 1 Jul 2025 at 9:51 pm UTC

Flatpak ain't the answer this time either.