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Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

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Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#41

Post by BearOso »

rurban wrote: post #20
deafpolygon wrote: post #18

Seems like an extreme response… other distros still exist. Plus they can still ship the 32bit binaries themselves. Fedora isn’t preventing you from using 32bit libs- fedora is just saying “hey we aren’t going to invest energy in maintaining something just 5% of our users use.”

No, they said: we don't want to build all 32-bit packages no one is using. libs which are used by games and such will be kept. So they need to keep gcc, glibc and binutils for 32bit also. Just not multilib, i686 cross is good enough

Read the discussion. They plan to remove those libraries, too. Their current automated build system apparently requires they build i686 for every x86-64 package. They don't want to spend the effort to adjust the build system to just build a selection of i686 packages. They plan to drop the whole architecture.

It seems like these developers have tunnel vision. It's like when pulseaudio came about and the whole focus was streaming Bluetooth audio. It took over the system audio and broke everything else (games, coincidentally). They know this will break some things they don't personally use, and they don't care.

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#42

Post by BearOso »

holowoodman wrote: post #32
rightbyte wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental problem is that there are many different 5% groups and that you are very likely to be in some 5% groups. In some way I feel dropping 32bit is capitulation to bloat. I for one use 32bit libs in x86 32bit mode quite a lot to test software I build for memory bugs such that it works on actual 32bit systems.

32bit support isn't just bad bloat due to larger pointers. Only doing 32bit and not doing amd64/x86_64 is also leaving a lot of performance on the table: x86 traditionally has very few registers to work with, amd64 gives you quite a few more general purpose registers, so your hand-fiddled assembler will be faster, and if you use compiled code, your compiler will have an easier time with optimizations, faster function…

I don't think this is very much about modern projects. Developers want to use 64-bit. It's more that removing the libraries breaks legacy 32-bit stuff that simply can't be updated.

The steam client should be upgraded, though. I understand it has to do with their ancient web view library not doing 64-bit, so they would have to change it and possibly mess up some of the layouts and overlays. But they went ahead and changed it on macOS anyway, so you know it can be done.

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#43

Post by tapoxi »

fpoling wrote: post #37
codedokode wrote: post #36

What happens to old software? How do you run 32-bit Linux apps? How do you run 32-bit Windows apps like VST plugins (audio effects)?

Use VM to run old distros or old Windows.

You don't need a VM, just a container.

Steam runs all games in containers anyway: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#44

Post by em-bee »

if i understand this correctly, bazzite is like SteamOS but based on fedora. it needs 32-bit support to run wine and steam.

i find it hard to believe that fedora will drop 32-bit support without ensuring that wine and steam will continue to work. why would they do that? that would not make sense at all.

but there is a lot of backslash on the change discussion: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f44-change-proposal-d... so i doubt this will happen until those issues are resolved.

but i am quite confused:

the example given, that eg cpython might drop 32-bit support, should not affect supporting 32-bit for applications that need it, like wine and steam.

i thought that an application that doesn't support 32-bit mode would only prevent it from running on 32-bit machines or running on an OS in 32-bit mode on 64-bit machines, which was dropped 5 years ago. so where is the problem here?

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#45

Post by piperswe »

cluckindan wrote: post #29
charcircuit wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most 32 bit dependencies would not need to be upgraded. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is for the graphics driver.

Which is typically closed source, right?

Only for NVIDIA cards, which are the worst option for a Linux system anyways

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#46

Post by linotype »

BearOso wrote: post #41
rurban wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they said: we don't want to build all 32-bit packages no one is using. libs which are used by games and such will be kept. So they need to keep gcc, glibc and binutils for 32bit also. Just not multilib, i686 cross is good enough

Read the discussion. They plan to remove those libraries, too. Their current automated build system apparently requires they build i686 for every x86-64 package. They don't want to spend the effort to adjust the build system to just build a selection of i686 packages. They plan to drop the whole architecture. It seems like these developers have tunnel vision. It's like when pulseaudio came about and the whole focus w…

Are there stats on the number of people who are still running i686?

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#47

Post by SpaghettiCthulu »

striking wrote: post #35
prmoustache wrote: post #28

Bazzite maintainers have access to the source code of these libs, they can totally compile and distribute 32bits versions of them. Title should really be: Bazzite maintainers don't want to make a slight effort to maintain stuff.

"slight effort" seems disingenuous, given this quote from the source thread: > If this shipped today, to accomplish this we’d need to: > 1: Build all of the packages Steam needs in a copr or similar > 2: Build a custom version of Proton with experimental Wow64 features turned on > 3: Instruct all users to manually change their steam settings to use that proton version because the ones Valve provides don’t have that.…

Why would OBS not work?

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#49

Post by Sateallia »

ekianjo wrote: post #34
prmoustache wrote: post #28

Bazzite maintainers have access to the source code of these libs, they can totally compile and distribute 32bits versions of them. Title should really be: Bazzite maintainers don't want to make a slight effort to maintain stuff.

Also their days are counted as SteamOS is now going to other handheld devices apart from the Steam Deck so... Not sure their project will still exist one year down the road.

I use Bazzite on my Steam Deck for better Btrfs, Decky Loader and Waydroid support. Support for these things on SteamOS via community projects are fragile (Decky Loader breaks often with Steam updates, steamos-btrfs runs a payload that may or may not work after updates, the widely used Waydroid installer comes with prebuilt kernel modules which I am not okay with). Bazzite has purposes other than installing SteamOS on unsupported devices.

Re: Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

#50

Post by em-bee »

em-bee wrote: post #44

if i understand this correctly, bazzite is like SteamOS but based on fedora. it needs 32-bit support to run wine and steam. i find it hard to believe that fedora will drop 32-bit support without ensuring that wine and steam will continue to work. why would they do that? that would not make sense at all. but there is a lot of backslash on the change discussion: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f44-change-proposa…

this article explains a bit more.

https://ostechnix.com/fedora-32-bit-i686-support-withdrawal-...

currently only kernel and installers for 32-bit are dropped, but all packages are still built for 32-bit. why? that too doesn't make much sense either. are they still supporting running on 32-bit systems with an old or custom kernel? what for?

so that seems to be the problem then. somehow fedora is still supporting running on 32-bit systems. well, yes. do change that. but that doesn't mean that multilib support needs to be dropped. is there a problem to limit the build of 32-bit packages to only those that are needed?

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