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Comment by trasz3 | Hacker News Reader

But still only as a 32-bit binary, in 2023.

Does it need to be 64-bit?

There is pressure to drop support for running 32 bit binaries and to stop packaging 32 bit libraries. Steam is pretty much the main force holding this transition off. Ubuntu proposed it a while ago and valve said they just wouldn’t support Ubuntu any more.

Apple did it way back and valve just updated to support 64bit for macOS.

FWIW we've been waiting for a native M1 Steam app on macOS for more than 2 years since launch, I guess we need to wait for Apple to drop Intel support.

Valve does some outstanding work on things like Proton and the Steamdeck, but the main client is incredibly bad. It's slow and clunky on every platform including windows. Its _just_ good enough to be usable but still leaves you feeling disappointed.

IIRC its essentially build on same concept as electron but an entirely custom thing since electron presumably didn't exist when they created it.

Many games are still 32-bit and will never be updated. This idea of killing off distro-level 32-bit support is pretty silly overall, especially since there's never much of an excuse for doing so (beyond "but it's old so it must be bad!").

For games, they should probably be wrapped in some kind of emulation layer like dosbox. For still supported software, there is really no reason to continue supporting 32 bit binaries at the OS level.

Or proton … not all are dos.

It's there, it works, and there will always be legacy software. What is there to gain from killing it?

Clearly Apple and Canonical felt there was a lot to be gained. The obvious one being that you don’t have to build and host a second set of packages for 32 bit.

When I tried installing it via apt on ubuntu 2204, it wanted to install an entire 32-bit GPU driver chain. Couldn't ctrl-c fast enough

It's still 32-bit on Windows too, for some reason. I have it installed via Flatpak to avoid the pile of 32-bit libraries.

Ah okay yeah that's a huge issue.

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