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 Thankfully, for now at least, the whole proposal has been withdrawn by the original developer that submitted it.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
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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
About the author - Liam Dawe
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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Pecisk 14 hours ago
Shame about toxicity around this subject matter. This will have to happen eventually, but it is gigantic task, so I understand chicken and egg problem here.
I hope Valve team has some plan to move away from 32 bit completely, but again, I don't know complexities involved.
I hope Valve team has some plan to move away from 32 bit completely, but again, I don't know complexities involved.
4 Likes
Stella 14 hours ago
Thank goodness this was withdrawn. However the reputation damage that was done to Fedora is likely irreparable. This proposal couldn't have come at a worse time, with Windows 10 support ending in a few months. So many people were worried they had to switch to another Linux distro if half of their games and Steam stopped working. In my opinion this proposal to remove parts of the OS crucial for legacy gaming sended the wrong signal to Windows people looking to switch. Legacy compatibility is a defining feature of PC ecosystem, after all
Last edited by Stella on 30 Jun 2025 at 8:50 am UTC
Last edited by Stella on 30 Jun 2025 at 8:50 am UTC
3 Likes
ssj17vegeta 14 hours ago
Thank goodness this was withdrawn. However the reputation damage that was done to Fedora is likely irreparable. This proposal couldn't have come at a worse time, with Windows 10 support ending in a few months. So many people were worried they had to switch to another Linux distro if half of their games and Steam stopped working
I'm relieved it was, too. Switched to Fedora like a year ago because I was fed of Ubuntu snap-nonsense, and I've been nothing but amazed with how well Fedora works.
While I agree with you on the poor timing and the overall bad idea, I hopefully can't really imagine that proposal would do any kind of reputation damage to Fedora though. It was the initiative of 3 people, and again, just a proposal.
3 Likes
I'm quite disappointed that he bailed out on this.
Honestly expected, given the negative press coverage and toxic, rabid comments from the "reee mu games" crowd, but nonetheless rather unimpressed about the outcome.
Instead of a strictly technical debate about the merits, the fallout consequences, and how to deal with them from a practical, actionable, "what can we do about it?" point of view, it turned out into a us-vs-them fistfight that helped nobody.
The issue remains, and of course will become worse every passing month, when more upstream drops support for legacy, and more people will expect support for obsolete, unmaintaned applications (for who commented about the kernel being 30 years old: UNMAINTAINED is the keyword here, and I don't think I need to explain why) which will become all the more burdensome the more time it passes.
Mark my words. This mess will rear its ugly head again, and more frequently every passing year.
A pyhrric victory for who cannot accept the hard fact that an early 2000 unmaintaned game belongs to a containerized or emulated environment, not to daily maintainer burden.
Honestly expected, given the negative press coverage and toxic, rabid comments from the "reee mu games" crowd, but nonetheless rather unimpressed about the outcome.
Instead of a strictly technical debate about the merits, the fallout consequences, and how to deal with them from a practical, actionable, "what can we do about it?" point of view, it turned out into a us-vs-them fistfight that helped nobody.
The issue remains, and of course will become worse every passing month, when more upstream drops support for legacy, and more people will expect support for obsolete, unmaintaned applications (for who commented about the kernel being 30 years old: UNMAINTAINED is the keyword here, and I don't think I need to explain why) which will become all the more burdensome the more time it passes.
Mark my words. This mess will rear its ugly head again, and more frequently every passing year.
A pyhrric victory for who cannot accept the hard fact that an early 2000 unmaintaned game belongs to a containerized or emulated environment, not to daily maintainer burden.
8 Likes
Eduardo Medina 13 hours ago
I'm relieved it was, too. Switched to Fedora like a year ago because I was fed of Ubuntu snap-nonsense, and I've been nothing but amazed with how well Fedora works.I think that many people, because there is a hate campaign against Red Hat and IBM, will start to say tons of apocalyptic sentences. This is not the first time that a proposal is rejected and it will not be the last.
While I agree with you on the poor timing and the overall bad idea, I hopefully can't really imagine that proposal would do any kind of reputation damage to Fedora though. It was the initiative of 3 people, and again, just a proposal.
People forget when Ubuntu proposed the same thing some years ago.
In my case, as an orthodox Silverblue user, I supported the proposition, but most of people in Fedora use a monstrosity called Workstation.
1 Likes
Pyrate 13 hours ago
I don't like the gaslighting nature of the last point the dev made here. While the proposal post was indeed flooded with dozens of people concerned their games won't work, there were at least a couple Fedora packagers conversing in a passive aggresive manner you'd expect out of smug and snarky open-source devs who probably think they're better than everyone, it got to the point where one was more-or-less making fun of Bazzite's devs inability to handle the 32bits themselves.
No reason to mention names because that's not the point. Pretty crappy to see all around. At least this attitide was only expressed by a couple Fedora people and not a majority, so we're good for niw. Like I said in the previous posts about this matter, the worst thing wasn't the proposal, it's the attitude behind it.
Lastly,as brought up by a user in the proposal:
These points of friction with Red Hat for Fedora will only intensify with proposals (driven especially with an attitude) such as this one. The Fedora people are not helping themselves stopping these points from being brought up.
These were just a couple points I learned from this change proposal story.
No reason to mention names because that's not the point. Pretty crappy to see all around. At least this attitide was only expressed by a couple Fedora people and not a majority, so we're good for niw. Like I said in the previous posts about this matter, the worst thing wasn't the proposal, it's the attitude behind it.
Lastly,as brought up by a user in the proposal:
I see that at least 2 of 3 owners of this proposal are employed by Red Hat. Considering that RHEL dropped support for 32-bit libraries, the desire to remove these from Fedora as well is not surprising from the prespective of cutting maintenance costs (hardware + human-hours). However, this change proposal appears to not consider other perspectives and it makes me doubt my understanding of Fedora’s role in the grand scheme of things.
These points of friction with Red Hat for Fedora will only intensify with proposals (driven especially with an attitude) such as this one. The Fedora people are not helping themselves stopping these points from being brought up.
These were just a couple points I learned from this change proposal story.
2 Likes
Rph 12 hours ago
Frankly I'm most disappointed in Valve here. Steam is already 64 bit on macOS, the 2019 Ubuntu discussion should have been a sign to start moving the client to be 64 bit - A process that's clearly possible. Use the Steam Runtime to provide 32 bit libraries for ancient unupdated games.
0 Likes
KodiCraft 12 hours ago
I don't like the gaslighting nature of the last point the dev made here. While the proposal post was indeed flooded with dozens of people concerned their games won't work, there were at least a couple Fedora packagers conversing in a passive aggresive manner
Huh? What?? They say something that you yourself admit is true and because they don't also mention that a couple of people were allegedly "passive aggresive" that's gaslighting?? Do you even know what gaslighting is??
And as a side note, yes experienced distro maintainers do, by the very nature of what they do, know more about maintaining software than random gamers. If you don't have the expertise to talk on this subject nobody has to take your opinion seriously, that's just how things are.
1 Likes
emphy 11 hours ago
I am disappointed in some of the reactions this :double_exclamation_mark: proposal :double_exclamation_mark: 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”.
Um, how charitable can one, as a user of 32bit software, read: "Drop 32-bit multilib support on x86_64 and stop building packages for i686"?
If the proposal is to drop 32bit, then it breaks everything 32bit. As this happens to include major parts of the "gaming use case", this proposal would break said case.
Last edited by emphy on 30 Jun 2025 at 11:52 am UTC
2 Likes
Eike 11 hours ago
Um, how charitable can one, as a user of 32bit software, read: "Drop 32-bit multilib support on x86_64 and stop building packages for i686"?
If the proposal is to drop 32bit, then it breaks everything 32bit. As this happens to include major parts of the "gaming use case", this proposal would break said case.
I didn't read said thread, but they're complaining that people assumed breaking gaming was their intent , when actually they were addressing existing (and hardly deniable) problems.
1 Likes
PixelBrushArt 10 hours ago
My problem with this whole discourse was how sensationalized it was by YouTubers and the like.
Everyone was talking about it like all of Steam and their games would be erased by next week. It was just a PROPOSAL! It's something that needs to be done sooner or later, and all this Dev was trying to do was provide a gentle nudge asking "Hey, could we look into this?".
I don't know how many people in various Discords and Subreddits asked if Fedora or Bazzite were about to implode overnight, and worryingly wondered if they needed to switch.
The response by the Bazzite devs, saying that the project would need to be shut down if this went through, only added more fuel to the fire. Don't do that!
Fedora itself has done nothing wrong. The Dev who proposed it did nothing wrong.
The only people to blame are the people who sensationalized it and Valve for still not having put out a 64-Bit Build of Steam for Linux. They should've taken care of this back when the Steam Deck released for crying out loud.
Everyone was talking about it like all of Steam and their games would be erased by next week. It was just a PROPOSAL! It's something that needs to be done sooner or later, and all this Dev was trying to do was provide a gentle nudge asking "Hey, could we look into this?".
I don't know how many people in various Discords and Subreddits asked if Fedora or Bazzite were about to implode overnight, and worryingly wondered if they needed to switch.
The response by the Bazzite devs, saying that the project would need to be shut down if this went through, only added more fuel to the fire. Don't do that!
Fedora itself has done nothing wrong. The Dev who proposed it did nothing wrong.
The only people to blame are the people who sensationalized it and Valve for still not having put out a 64-Bit Build of Steam for Linux. They should've taken care of this back when the Steam Deck released for crying out loud.
2 Likes
Liam Dawe 10 hours ago
But proposals get turned into reality. People were commenting on if the proposal was to go through. People were right to worry, because even if it was coming in a later Fedora release (44), it would have caused major problems.
You can't argue away peoples genuine concerns.
You can't argue away peoples genuine concerns.
5 Likes
sudoer 9 hours ago
Mark my words. This mess will rear its ugly head again, and more frequently every passing year.
I've book-marked your post and will be checking it every year from now on, in the meantime I will be advising people to use Ubuntu instead of Fedora because of that.
1 Likes
amatai 9 hours ago
The proposal was not to break gaming on Linux, rather than not having the whole load of 32 bits maintenance on the distro maintainers.
Distro maintainer is a tough job, and they did not get much credits for that, but they got a lot of flak whenever they try to reduce the load to a more manageable level (dropping xorg, using systemd,...). Maintaining a distro is increasingly complex and the wear of it has caused the death of many great distros. By all mean, maintainers deserve their propositions to be received charitably.
As for the proposed change, I think we need a dedicated emulation project for legacy 32 bits software, much like proton for games, XWayland for X11 built on Wayland, and so forth. It is not a Fedora issue, it is a distro maintainer issue and I can see a future where only Debian, Arch, their derivative and smaller-scope distro focused on 32 bits compatibility still have 32 bits (Arch because of its manpower, Debian because it ships a major version every 5 years).
Distro maintainer is a tough job, and they did not get much credits for that, but they got a lot of flak whenever they try to reduce the load to a more manageable level (dropping xorg, using systemd,...). Maintaining a distro is increasingly complex and the wear of it has caused the death of many great distros. By all mean, maintainers deserve their propositions to be received charitably.
As for the proposed change, I think we need a dedicated emulation project for legacy 32 bits software, much like proton for games, XWayland for X11 built on Wayland, and so forth. It is not a Fedora issue, it is a distro maintainer issue and I can see a future where only Debian, Arch, their derivative and smaller-scope distro focused on 32 bits compatibility still have 32 bits (Arch because of its manpower, Debian because it ships a major version every 5 years).
1 Likes
@sundoer
Fun (!) part: Ubuntu already tried to get rid of this more than five years ago (19.10 and 20.04 LTS) and received the same flak.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32-bit-i386-packages-for-ubuntu-19-10-and-20-04-lts
It's just a matter of time before all distros will go this way, hopefully coordinating a cutoff release point together.
We're just delaying the inevitable, until the point it will be really hard to manage the fallout.
Fun (!) part: Ubuntu already tried to get rid of this more than five years ago (19.10 and 20.04 LTS) and received the same flak.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32-bit-i386-packages-for-ubuntu-19-10-and-20-04-lts
It's just a matter of time before all distros will go this way, hopefully coordinating a cutoff release point together.
We're just delaying the inevitable, until the point it will be really hard to manage the fallout.
2 Likes
sudoer 9 hours ago
Fun (!) part: Ubuntu already tried to get rid of this more than five years ago (19.10 and 20.04 LTS) and received the same flak.
The fun part is that they learned their lesson and didn't try that again, while you and the 3 representatives of Red Hat seemed to not have learned anything from it.
Last edited by sudoer on 30 Jun 2025 at 2:03 pm UTC
5 Likes
CyborgZeta 8 hours ago
I very much enjoy using Bazzite on my desktop (and Aurora on my laptops) because it works very well for gaming and general usage. If this proposal had become reality, I would've had to find another distro; and finding one that does everything needed OOTB for gaming like Bazzite would be difficult. There's a good reason Bazzite has gotten as popular as it has; I even recommend it to people interested in switching to Linux but still want to game.
I'm not a programmer/developer/whatever, so most of the technical jargon goes over my head. All I know is that 32-bit libraries are still needed for things like gaming, and that we're not at a point where everything can be containerized. More than a few people pointed out the issues with things like the Steam Flatpak in that Fedora discussion thread.
It's also apparent from that same thread that several people from Fedora don't give a hoot about gaming and would axe 32-bit tomorrow if they could. Fair enough, I suppose, since Fedora is a distro that likes to push new things, and I imagine a lot of the people who work on Fedora would prefer not to maintain old things.
It makes me wonder if making gaming-focused distros like Nobara and Bazzite based on Fedora was a mistake.
I'm not a programmer/developer/whatever, so most of the technical jargon goes over my head. All I know is that 32-bit libraries are still needed for things like gaming, and that we're not at a point where everything can be containerized. More than a few people pointed out the issues with things like the Steam Flatpak in that Fedora discussion thread.
It's also apparent from that same thread that several people from Fedora don't give a hoot about gaming and would axe 32-bit tomorrow if they could. Fair enough, I suppose, since Fedora is a distro that likes to push new things, and I imagine a lot of the people who work on Fedora would prefer not to maintain old things.
It makes me wonder if making gaming-focused distros like Nobara and Bazzite based on Fedora was a mistake.
2 Likes
pleasereadthemanual 7 hours ago
Some points to summarize the whole thing:
> 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. There are some solutions in place to work around this. And maybe it's not so bad for games, I don't know, but a bunch of stuff is going to break. It'll be worse for embedded systems which still heavily rely on 32-bit software for all kinds of critical things.
> Dropping 32-bit support would also kill FEX on ARM, a translation layer for running x86 binaries on ARM, e.g. for Asahi Linux.
> Steam + Gamescope work in Flatpak, but not in Game Mode which is what Bazzite is using it for, so it's not an option. There are some bugs besides.
> Bazzite can't build 32-bit packages themselves because they need to be kept in sync with the respective 64-bit packages, which is incredibly difficult -> impossible. They might as well just discontinue the project or base it off a different distribution.
> Fedora can't just drop the ~9000 packages that have nothing to do with Steam because of the way their build system is made. It would require radical changes to the build system to drop all the non-Steam related 32-bit packages like Ubuntu and Arch have done (these distributions only have a few hundred 32-bit packages).
> WOW64, Wine's translation mode for executing 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems, is still experimental and has bugs.
> 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. The big exception is Valve games like Counterstrike 2, which only support VAC on the native binaries, IIRC, and I believe they are all 32-bit.
> OBS' game recording feature relies on 32-bit libraries, and that will be broken too if 32-bit support is dropped.
> I think there was bad attitude from a lot of people in this thread, and tensions were running high. 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.
This summary was not produced by an LLM :)
Had this proposal gone ahead, I think all users should be entitled to a full refund for the support contracts they had taken out with Fedora.
> 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. There are some solutions in place to work around this. And maybe it's not so bad for games, I don't know, but a bunch of stuff is going to break. It'll be worse for embedded systems which still heavily rely on 32-bit software for all kinds of critical things.
> Dropping 32-bit support would also kill FEX on ARM, a translation layer for running x86 binaries on ARM, e.g. for Asahi Linux.
> Steam + Gamescope work in Flatpak, but not in Game Mode which is what Bazzite is using it for, so it's not an option. There are some bugs besides.
> Bazzite can't build 32-bit packages themselves because they need to be kept in sync with the respective 64-bit packages, which is incredibly difficult -> impossible. They might as well just discontinue the project or base it off a different distribution.
> Fedora can't just drop the ~9000 packages that have nothing to do with Steam because of the way their build system is made. It would require radical changes to the build system to drop all the non-Steam related 32-bit packages like Ubuntu and Arch have done (these distributions only have a few hundred 32-bit packages).
> WOW64, Wine's translation mode for executing 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems, is still experimental and has bugs.
> 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. The big exception is Valve games like Counterstrike 2, which only support VAC on the native binaries, IIRC, and I believe they are all 32-bit.
> OBS' game recording feature relies on 32-bit libraries, and that will be broken too if 32-bit support is dropped.
> I think there was bad attitude from a lot of people in this thread, and tensions were running high. 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.
This summary was not produced by an LLM :)
Had this proposal gone ahead, I think all users should be entitled to a full refund for the support contracts they had taken out with Fedora.
9 Likes
dpanter 6 hours ago
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:
Have fun!
F40 Change Request: Privacy-preserving Telemetry for Fedora Workstation (System-Wide)Have fun!
1 Likes
@sudoers
So you think this isn't just delayed on Canonical's part, but they will support 32bit forever?
Ok.
The fun part is that they learned their lesson and didn't try that again
So you think this isn't just delayed on Canonical's part, but they will support 32bit forever?
Ok.
3 Likes
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