Fedora proposal to drop 32-bit support has been withdrawn

There was a whole lot of discussion recently for the Fedora Linux proposal to drop 32-bit support, with the current plan being dropped.

I covered the initial proposal here on GamingOnLinux with the current problems it would cause, like how Bazzite would have been forced to shut. Thankfully, for now at least, the whole proposal has been withdrawn by the original developer that submitted it.

Writing in the Fedora forum feedback thread about it, the developer Fabio Valentini said:

Given feedback in this thread (and to a lesser extent, also on the mailing list) I have decided to withdraw this proposal.

• It is clear that the Fedora 44 target for this Change was too early. To some degree, I expected this to be the case, and was prepared to move the proposed implementation of the Change to a later release. Fedora 44 was just the earliest “reasonable” target. However, I think this also shows an inherent conflict in the current Changes process - if a big Change (like this one) is submitted quite early (out of caution!), that also front-loads the discussion and decision process instead of giving things more time. For example, I don’t think the discussion would have been meaningfully different if the targeted release had been Fedora 46 instead of 44 - which is one of the reasons why I decided to withdraw the change instead of just re-targeting it at a later Fedora release.

• I don’t think the problem that was attempted to be addressed with this proposal will go away. With more and more projects dropping official support for building / running their software on 32-bit architectures, it’s just going to get worse over the next few years. Dealing with widely used software falling out from under our feet won’t be fun. To some degree, always pushing the latest and greatest software in Fedora is also working against us here - if we just stuck with foo 1.0 LTS for 10 years, we just wouldn’t need to care that foo 3.0 dropped support for running on 32-bit systems …

• 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”. That said, I was expecting a lot of feedback feedback on this one, but not hundreds of people shouting "DON’T DO THIS WHY DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR USERS I WILL SWITCH DISTROS IMMEDIATELY levels of feedback (though to some degree, I also blame clickbait “tech press” or YouTubers for that …)

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I am now looking forward to seeing actual (and actionable) counter-proposals.

At least for now there's no issues continuing gaming on Fedora, but this situation will come up again in future. Hopefully a more thought-out plan will be made for it as to not cause issues with the likes of Steam and various 32-bit games and apps that will never be updated.