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Comment by erwincoumans | Hacker News Reader

And damn Valve for not supporting a 64 bit Linux Steam client. Having to mess with installing 32bit OpenGL drivers just for Valve, sometimes messing up the installation left a bad taste.

At least give users the option to pick either 32bit or 64bit client. I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that. And people who want 32bit games pick the 32bit client.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#...

"Please provide a 64-bit Steam package, so that those of us on 64-bit distros don't have to install a gazillion 32-bit packages."

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There is a community contributed Steam Flatpak that isolates its dependencies away from the system. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam

Seemed to do the job fine, ymmv.

> I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that.

Really? There are still many x86-only games on Steam, tons of which probably won't ever be updated. And if Valve does not make that clear on the Store pages then they will receive part of the blame and support burden.

I think what is more likely to happen is for Steam to come with it's own 32-bit dependencies that marshal to the 64-bit system GL/Vulkan/etc. The client itself might be ported to 64-bit too but that would not even be needed at that point.

This is already partially the case today - the Steam runtime contains most required 32-bit (and 64-bit) libraries and Steam is already (optionally) using containers for games: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/t...

Presentation on this from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrbWbBYAolo

Yes really, I have no interest in playing 32bit games on Linux, and Valve could make it blatantly obvious that a 64bit client cannot play 32bit games. So if Valve is really concerned, just make the 32bit client download primary and have the 64bit download behind some EULA that explains that it only supports 64bit games.

In fact, I'm mostly on MacOS M1, and there is only a 64bit client on that. Sure, the game collection is small, but I'm fine with that.

So you expect Valve to prioritize a client that will only be usable for a minority of a minority (Linux users that understand what 32-bit and 64-bit are and are OK with excluding games based on an arbitrary 64-bit only restriction) while there is no pressing need for it since you can run 32-bit Steam on pretty much any distribution after installing a couple of extra packages?

This would also mean maintaining multiple runtimes, wouldn't it? That's not work I'd be excited to do.

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