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Comment by simosx | Hacker News Reader

The main benefit is that it makes Steam not depend anymore on the installed packages of the host Linux distribution.

Part of this is that Steam can still use 32-bit libraries even when the host Linux distribution has fully moved to 64-bit.

See recent discussion at https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32-bit-i386-packages-fo...

While you would have expected from Valve to use an existing container platform, they went ahead and used directly the security features of the Linux kernel in Steam.

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This might actually get me back into using Steam on Linux. I've bought cheap old school games "ported" to Linux that were just Wine underneath and the endless hassle of trying to get the dependencies fixed to where it wouldn't crash took literally hours and then halfway through the game it crashes and I wasn't even able to fix that one. Being able to just wrap everything up all nice and neat in a fixed environment could be a godsend for some of these old games.

Assuming your kernel is compiled with IA32 emulation

It's not emulation; x86_64 processors are backwards compatible (to a fault, arguably...), so it's just a little bit of support that AFAIK everyone leaves enabled because why not.

I am aware, nevertheless the flag is called CONFIG_IA32_EMULATION because the 64bit kernel is emulating the 32bit syscall interface.

I'm building a new PC soon and plan on trying my hand at a Gentoo box. Is this something I want to make sure is set if I wish to use steam?

For now, I think it's the default everywhere.

> The main benefit is that it makes Steam not depend anymore on the installed packages of the host Linux distribution.

Now if only most other Linux software could do that.

Aah no!

You get this with Snaps, Flatpak and AppImages

I'd argue you really only get it with AppImage, which is treated like garbage by the community as a whole.

Its not needed since most linux software is open source and gets packaged properly for each distro.

And when it isn't one of those things, well, fuck you I guess. That's one of the biggest reasons I think a lot of people don't use Linux, yet the Linux Desktop community consistently ignores and dismisses the issue and then wonders why Linux Desktop isn't more popular.

Flatpak exists to solve this problem.

Flatpak unfortunately has other issues inherited from a repo-based approach. Like, it can't be installed to a separate disk than the rest of the system and you can't use anything not in your repo, forcing you to setup pretty much 1 repo/application, which is ridiculous.

That didn't stop macos or android devs from uploading their apps to the play store and app store.

Oh you mean those stores developers are constantly complaining about because of entry barriers and having no recourse when their software is arbitrarily booted out? Or the ones where users complain that they can't get older versions of software and have difficulty legitimate apps in seas of fakes?

Repo models are antithetical to the concept of personal computing in my opinion.

It could of course, see for example any big commercial software like Mathematica, Matlab etc. . However, doing things that way is something you really, really want to avoid if at all possible.

Why? Because it actually works and makes things simple instead of causing a giant headache for users? Because it gives users the power to consume software directly from developers, cutting out a third party repo maintainer?

Yeah sure, those are obviously the reasons.

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