The alternative is to just not do it and pretend this is a defensible position. I don't think "but having my OS actually run software is hard and users who insist on it are being unrealistic" is a defensible technical position.

"I'm not going to do this in my free time; it's no fun" is an understandable position, though...

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I think that the situation is the opposite. Windows doesn't kill anything, it keeps very old components for decades that makes the operating system extremely heavy and inefficient.

When we're talking about old libraries, the "advantage" of Windows is "DLL Hell": Every game has it's own libraries lying around, and nobody cares that the versions are outdated, unmaintained and have more holes than a Swiss Cheese.

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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.

There's no problem with "touching the base OS". 32 bit and 64 bit can reside side by side all fine.

The problem is that 32 bit libraries are more and more unmaintained, more and more difficult to build.
(Fedora people are saying this in 2025 - and Ubuntu people have been saying this in 2019 already! (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/intel-32bit-packages-on-ubuntu-from-19-10-onwards/11263/2 [External Link])

What's "antithetical to the concept of Flatpak" here?
Delivering maintained software? (Sorry, I could absolutely not resist.)

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10xx still covers around %10 of Steam survey and is more than enough for some people. They got the cut too early and new Mesa drivers can't properly support them due to no GSP.

They still do get the next driver. The next driver series. So I think it sounds more dangerous than it is at the moment.

(It gets closer to my GTX 1660S though...)

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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?

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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.

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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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An excellent bundle for any penguin-shaped pointing and clicking enthusiast. I bought it for The Will of Arthur Flabbington with a couple of the Nobodies games for filler.

I loved the puzzles of The Will of Arthur Flabbington!
The graphics... not so much. :)
(It additionally hurts that one room was done by Tom Hardwidge (Lucy Dreaming). The difference is huge. X) )
But, it's good!

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So, what achievement do I get for successfully probing Uranus?

Maybe even depending on the.... findings?

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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.

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