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Calm down, this change does not even affect Native games. You can still not use Proton for Native and I believe it's even the default for most titles. All that this change was about is improving the UX on Linux and getting rid of the 'available for Windows only' warning next to every title that did not have Native build

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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.

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Note: this was originally published with a title saying "SteamOS 3.7.13 update brings wider handheld support", but I edited it as to not be unintentionally misleading.

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This feels like that moment in the sandbox where you've finished building whatever the heck and you stomp through and destroy it.

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The first thing I thought was "Can you do Godzilla?" and I am pleased to see in the trailer that yes, you can!

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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?

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Oh freaking heck. Proton Enabled by Default just means that there's no way to turn it off anymore. I had it turned off for the specific reason that I wanted to control which games without native Linux support would be allowed to run so that I don't make the mistake of running a game that lacks it without knowing full well that I am. Steam took that control away from me.

It's almost like they don't really care about native support at all and just want it to be obsolete.

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nice to see native support.

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

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Thats sick! i might just reinstall Half-Life 1 for this.

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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.

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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.

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Update: they were able to reproduce the problem. Has sonething to do with apparmor preventing the daemon from running. I'm waiting for a hotfix now

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@Brokatt: Heya, thanks for clarifying it a bit. That way the possible contradiction makes sense. Still gotta find out if I can keep using X11 with Kubuntu after the update though.

As for the problems, it was all kind of different things. A very good example was the last odyssey of trying to get certain games to run properly in 16:9 on my 32:9 screen. Many new-ish games (for example the System Shock Remake and Nobody wants to Die) behaved very strange with the resolution settings. Obvious solution for me was to run them via Gamescope in my preferred resolution. But in Fullscreen and Windowed-Fullscreen modes, Gamescope always kept the game on the left half of the screen (I want them centered). I tried a lot of possible solutions with forced positioning until I found out unlike X11, Wayland seems to just ignore them. I then tried to solve it with the Window-Behaviour-Tools (awesome tools btw.. as a Windows native from 3.11 to Win10, I could only dream of something like that), but could only get to a halfway acceptable workaround... basicly making windowed Gamescope look like borderless, but I either had to switch my taskbar to auto-hide or make the window always-on-top, so Alt+Tabbing wasnt possible anymore... both stuff I´d hate.
After a while I simply tried X11 just to notice that I don´t even need gamescope anymore because all the games where behaving just as I wanted while also solving most other problems I still had on my todo list and make most of the workarounds for problems I already solved unnecessary.

I'm can imagine most of the problems I encountered stem from me using a 32:9 screen and a rather new GPU (RX9070) and there are probably better solutions than the ones I worked out, but for me it was over a month of problem-whack-a-mole with solutions often leading to new problems that I could've spared myself by just using X11 from the start. I believe Wayland will be the future and it will be a good one, but for now I really want to stick with X11 until Wayland works better for my setup and preferences.

Since you asked, some other problems I encountered off the top of my head (I had solved some of them and for the other I was glad I no longer have to bother):
- Search within in the Steam-client (STRG+F) didn´t work properly (seemed to be some window-focus problem).
- Videos from Firefox's picture-in-picture mode didn´t stay on top
- Everything in the app "KolourPaint" looked ugly/oversharp.
- Some rare seconds-long graphics bugs with wrong colors, flipped image etc. that seemed more like typical effects of a damaged-cable or port (completely gone with X11, but they're back when I switch to Wayland).
- Like in my example above, I encountered other possible solutions for some problems that would've worked with X11 only to later find out the problem itself doesn´t even exist in X11, so the solution would work but isn´t needed anymore.
- I still have some wonkyness here and there with focus-behaviour of some windows/apps that I have to hunt down, but it feels like its down to only a third of what it was before. This is very subjective and might have to do with other stuff or just my imagination or some changes in my own usage behaviour, not sure.

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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.

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That video was pretty cringe, reminds me of the Merlin Rap from the 90s Brak Show

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6iJS-NxDFN4

If their goal was to burrow into my psyche I think they succeeded.

Edit: Also see distrotube rap

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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.

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@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!

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Naw! No vehicle combat. But still a very astonishing piece of art it is. Now I need friends to play with. 😅

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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.

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

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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.

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@sudoers

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.

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So WuWa might finally work? ProtonDB reports have been getting better but so far installing it directly via Steam only results in failed launch. I'll try this again.

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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)

Have fun!

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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.

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How do you all rate this game?

It has its number of fans, for sure. I'm not one of them though. I would call it "The Extensively Boring And Tedious inventory Management Simulator". I'm no stranger to survival games where you have these inventories to deal with a lot (like maybe Rust or The Long Dark/etc), but this one takes the cake, at least that's what I felt.
After many hours of playing I realize I've spent most of the time micromanaging the inventory, rather than doing something actually interesting. Maybe it gets better, but after around 20 Hrs of staring at freakishly small boxes (and text) with myriads of crap to move around, well, I gave up.
Likely I approached the game wrong or whatever, but yeah it does feel too "super complicated" for my taste.

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I love it!

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It seems the update has some issues, myself and at least 2 other people on the github were unable to get the daemon running on the Flatpak version (and some other person on the deb). I tried uninstalling, reinstalling, disabling, enabling, removing the daemon… And now LACT is completely borked for me. I don't get prompted anymore to reinstall the daemon, so honestly no clue what to do now. Dev already said in github that they cannot reproduce the problems

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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.

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