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Comment by capitainenemo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the whole reason Valve created steam runtimes so that they could have native linux binaries with also long patch lifetimes? AFAIK they even select Ubuntu LTS releases so they can surf off upstream patching for longer.

Ubuntu's extended support even pushes that out to 10 years, and I imagine Valve could also do its own patching (or just ignore security concerns).

Nice thing w/ Valve is they allow you to use your distro's libraries or switch to the runtime, depending on how much performance you are trying to eke out of a game.

Odds are anything written a decade ago doesn't need cutting edge performance though.

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I briefly touched on this but steam runtimes (aka shared library runtimes) in practice aren't as isolated as one would assume, an update to glibc is often enough to break applications targeting them. Furthermore, in practice many maintainers think little of video games and are often comfortable breaking them if it helps with the server side of things.

For evidence of this, look no further than Ubuntu, the basis of the steam runtime, dropping 32bit support and breaking all software (video games) that depend on it. Sure you can still use it for older stuff, but there is no future here.

Well. Microsoft is also dropping 32 bit support for Windows 10 in 2025. I guess that makes Proton some weird hackish abstraction layer over the continuously updated underlying linux libs. Would be funny if Proton gets pulled into Windows releases to maintain support for legacy games as Microsoft shortens the length of their support.

It would be very amusing to me if certain games on Windows could only be run via a hacky WSL -> Proton layer. Yet somehow not surprising ;)

Is Microsoft dropping support for 32bit binaries in 2025? I think it's just dropping hardware support.

Ah yeah, you're right. WOW64 appears to not be going anywhere anytime soon. Although. I gotta say, I don't use windows much, but some folks I kind of helped out on the side were upgrading to Windows 8 and were completely unable to launch their 32 bit XP accounting software binary with every emulation flag I tried. (could just have been my inexperience on this, but wasn't finding anything in the support guides).

Oddly enough, it ran fine in Wine in virtualbox in a small ubuntu instance, so they ended up just using that in seamless mode.

So, at least from past experience that legacy compat is not 100% and I'm guessing games might be even more finicky than accounting software.

They are however (by dropping the 32bit versions of Windows) dropping 16bit support. Which still exists in 32bit Windows 10 along with NTVDM (AKA DOS emulation). So I guess it's the end of the line for MSDOS?

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