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Valve Will Not Be Officially Supporting Ubuntu 19.10

175 points by MikusR 7y ago

CydeWeys 7y ago
The first consumer 64 bit processors came out a decade and a half ago. Why is legacy 32 bit still a thing? It's not like anyone can say they haven't had ample warning time that 32 bit deprecation was coming.
- kabwj 7y ago
  You can’t recompile executables you don’t have the source for.
  - lozenge 7y ago
    This is Steam itself, not a game. If they don't have the source, they'll have to drop Mac support too.
    - the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
      The mac market is bigger and some companies are porting 32bit games to 64bit.
      - Zardoz84 7y ago
        nobody would port old games that don't give revenues. For example, if Paradox/Cerberos don't move a finger to fix a stupid annoying bug of a game that have like 6 years old (Sword of the stars), why hell they would port to 64 bits ?
    - tomxor 7y ago
      Surely this is steam by proxy, how can they claim to support a platform if none of the 32 bit games work? I mean they could also probably port steam to NetBSD, but i doubt any games would work, so they wouldn't claim to support NetBSD.
    - lostgame 7y ago
      It's obviously more about the games themselves than the client, which are much more difficult to update in many cases and offering only 64-bit games would, AFAICT, vastly reduce the number of available titles in the library.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        They already distinguish platforms, if they just recognize 32-bit and 64-bit as platform features and recognize that games might require support for either or both features, this would be almost a non-issue and they would be more future proof.
    - Illniyar 7y ago
      Steam has a lot of 32bit only games. And it relies on WINE to run them. I doubt they have 64bit version of all their popular games. That is why windows is king for so long - the thought of dropping backward compatibility is unthinkable. Instead you do horrendous hacks to get things to work (such as having two different system folders - 1 for 32 bit executables and one for 64bit executables)
      - bpfrh 7y ago
        Microsoft made a hardcut with drivers on windows 7/8. The same will be done eventually for 32bit, just not now.
        jplayer01 7y ago
        Yeah, they're not going to drop 32-bit for the foreseeable future. They see the value in backwards compatibility, despite HN readers continuously criticizing them for the lengths they go to accomplish it, or straight up ignoring how much effort they've put into it. There's too much software that is only 32-bit, particularly in businesses, for it to be anything other than an ideological argument for "purity".
        thebitrot 7y ago
        doesn't microsoft also need to keep 32 bit windows so companies can run 16-bit software if they need to?
        badsectoracula 7y ago
        Considering new software is released as 32bit only as recently as today, this "eventually" will only come if PCs stop using CPUs from the Intel 8086 lineage.
    - kabwj 7y ago
      I was replying to the comment outside of the context of this article.
    - Cyph0n 7y ago
      But the point of Steam is to play games, and Valve does not have the source for those games.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    You can repackage them though.
- Illniyar 7y ago
  Steam for linux is heavily dependent on WINE. WINE has been reluctant to move to 64 bit because, as I understand it, it will mean that 32 bit executable(which are the majority of games they support, I think) won't be able to run with it[0]. At least that's how I understand it. It's more about the issues with backward compatibility then inability to create a 64bit version. [0]- https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147869.html https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147869...
  - donio 7y ago
    Wine has had 64 support for ages. A typical wine installation is multi-arch, supporting both 64 and 32 bit windows programs which is very important because running older 32 bit only programs is a huge use case for wine. The post you linked seems to be about the difficulty of packaging the 32 bit support for 64 bit only ubuntu.
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  Video games are more media than they are software. Sadly their format is software but their release is media. Old games aren't actively supported and won't be updated. You need to ensure some kind of compatibility with 32 bit software or drop a huge amount of support for games. And if you don't, the video game industry will probably drop you. I think you will probably need some kind of compatibility wrapper you can wrap 32 bit binaries in that will make it compatible with 64 bit systems.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Makes sense. I guess this isn't close to anything like what I use Linux for, nor is it a core requirement of a modern Linux desktop. I'd be surprised if I'm running any executables on Linux that were compiled more than, say, a year ago. The Ubuntu release cycle is every six months, with a lot of software updated more frequently than that. And yeah, maybe the compatibility layer should be provided by Steam itself, rather than the OS. Could even just be a container or a thin VM. I don't see why it should be the OS's responsibility to continue supporting 32 bit executables indefinitely. Certainly that's not something I would want Ubuntu spending a lot of effort on, as it doesn't benefit your basic Linux desktop, server, or development use cases.
  - needle0 7y ago
    This. Games are done when they're done; much like finished novels, films, or music, once the developer considers it done, it won't get updated anymore. Also likewise to film or music, if it ends up becoming a classic, it might get remastered or remade a decade or two later, but those are the exceptions rather than the norm. The vast majority of games will just stay like when they were originally made, much like the majority of novels, music, and film.
- lostgame 7y ago
  In media production, particularly film and audio, I am extremely dependent on, and enjoy far more more often than not - legacy plugins that may not even be manufactured any longer, or older versions I simply prefer. This is certainly not limited to the scope of media production. Heck, I even still keep a PPC iMac G4 with Tiger so I can play older Mac OS 9 games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Riven. The point is, many people prefer or are locked to older software that simply won't be updated for various reasons. When MacOS drops 32-bit support completely, I won't be upgrading. The warnings in Mojave are already bad enough.
  - sansnomme 7y ago
    How are you able to even deal with modern encodings and resolution for film on a legacy machine?
    - lostgame 7y ago
      My late 2013 MacBook Pro doesn't have issues with Final Cut Pro 7 in Sierra, which I vastly prefer for a lot of projects. It can handle 1080 just fine, I'm not interested in 4K for my purposes at the moment. For me it's more older VST's - I also keep a copy of Logic Pro 9 around for that exact reason. I certainly don't edit film on my G4! little laugh
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  There are some reasons to keep software as 32bit, like these: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu... (tl;dr - bigger pointers mean higher memory consumption, they don't want to break third-party plugins, and they're porting to managed anyway). Also, either I'm misunderstanding something, or Ubuntu is throwing the baby out with the washwater here. For example, Arch was always aggressive about not supporting anything but the typical desktop at the time of release, but the 32bit packages are still in a separate repo if anyone needs them.
  - mruts 7y ago
    Also aren’t 64 bit apps slower?
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Believe they are faster on amd/intel because of increased registers and new instructions.
- overgard 7y ago
  It wasn't really until windows xp died that you could reasonably expect to drop 32 bit support, and windows xp lasted forever. Mix that in with 64bit not providing much benefit if you weren't addressing more than 2GB of ram and it took quite a while for 64bit adoption to become the norm even though hardware support was present.
  - mrighele 7y ago
    The first 64 bit release of Firefox for Windows [1] was Firefox 43.0 which was released at the end of 2015 [2] [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3015388/mozilla-finally-ships-64-bit-firefox-for-windows.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3015388/mozilla-finall... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/43.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/43.0/releasenotes/
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  There aren't many reasons to use 64bit if your program doesn't use much memory so if you stick with 32bit your program will use less memory (64bit pointers are mostly a waste of space) and run in more systems (those that for one reason or another cannot run 64bit code - note that this isn't just the CPU not being 64bit capable, firmware could also prevent 64bit support and some low end machines with 2GB of RAM could also come with 32bit Windows preinstalled which save both disk space - no 64bit libraries - and RAM).
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    End of support for 32 bit seems like a pretty damn good reason not to use it, I must say. It's better and simpler overall if everything is on the same page and you don't have to worry about compatibility issues; this gives more benefit than whatever marginal benefit exists for allowing small programs to run more memory efficiently.
    - badsectoracula 7y ago
      My comment was about 32 bit code in general, not just about Ubuntu. There is no end of 32 bit support, neither on Windows nor on Linux (the kernel itself can run even on a 486 IIRC) and AFAIK even macOS can still run 32 bit code. Of course individual distributions like Ubuntu can drop 32 bit support (and personally i do not see it as much of an issue since you can switch distributions and Valve can simply recommend one that doesn't arbitrarily break their users' programs), but that is just the distribution doing it. The kernel can still run 32bit code and with enough effort even 19.10 will be able to run 32bit programs, the whole hubbub is about avoiding that effort.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Nobody cares if 32 bit is outdated. People still care about running windows games on linux which are still mostly 32 bit including things released yesterday not 15 years ago.
CorvusCrypto 7y ago
I'm fine with this, but it is a bit annoying to see a developer not deal with 64-bit builds. I wonder if it's only because Windows allows them to be lazy while it generates more money for them? Either way I think valve's Linux team should rethink this. They depend on 32-bit libs, but Surely they can find alternatives for the 64-bit build and who knows it might even make the experience on Linux even better.
- captainbland 7y ago
  My guess is that there are a lot of third party developed games which only work on 32-bit compatible systems and Valve either doesn't know exactly which ones are which or simply doesn't want to put the effort into organising them such that users are warned about which specific games have incompatibilities. The other option is just letting the games that would only work on 32-bit compatible systems fail with cryptic error messages and have to field masses of complaints about it while looking extremely unprofessional in the process. In this case it's not that surprising that they would just decide to drop support, especially considering that Ubuntu is a relatively small chunk of the market to begin with. It's pretty unfortunate. I totally get Canonical's desire to get rid of the seemingly unnecessary bloat and maintenance burden from having to support 32-bit applications but this is the consequence and it's a big blow to gaming on Ubuntu, especially seeing as Steam has only been supported on Ubuntu since 2013.
  - sunstone 7y ago
    Ubuntu makes its money from server and enterprise clients. If Valve needs to support 16/32 bit for its customers then it's up to them to do it. I expect Valve is a much bigger company than Ubuntu, maybe Valve can contract out this work to ... Ubuntu instead of just freeloading.
    - ilikehurdles 7y ago
      Valve has contributed a ton of work to Ubuntu/Linux. They’ve pretty much single handedly turned around Linux gaming to the point where I can safely expect most windows-exclusive games on steam will run smoothly on Ubuntu. Freeloading couldn’t be farther from the truth.
mpartel 7y ago
I wonder if this statement is mostly an attempt to get Ubuntu to reverse course. It seems unwise to pull support from the most popular distro if it could be supported with additional technical effort, such as bundling the libraries with Steam. Of course that's effort that Valve would likely prefer to spend elsewhere.
- wolco 7y ago
  I think Ubuntu will lose its status as most popular distro after 19.
  - asark 7y ago
    This whole thing has been pretty funny. Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work. Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games! Valve: ...
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      That was after they realise that it boils down to 1% market size.
      - cwyers 7y ago
        Right. Valve wants gaming on Linux as a hedge against Microsoft. They are swimming in money from selling cosmetic items in TF2 and Counterstrike and DOTA. So they can subsidize a bunch of Linux development that has no short term revenue value because they view a single dependency on Windows as a threat to their Steam vig revenue. Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.
        pvg 7y ago
        I think most of their revenue is from their distributor's cut - even Valve can't sell $3.5 billion worth of TF2 hats.
fabian2k 7y ago
One big issue from what I read are installers for Windows software running in WINE. The installers are often still 32bit, and without 32bit support they won't work anymore. So even if the actual Windows application is 64bit, you can't run it in WINE because you can't install it. This doesn't really surprise me, one big specialized software I used a while ago couldn't be installed under Windows 7 64bit because the installer still was 16bit. I don't think anyone wants to touch a still working installer unless they have to, so they stay behind in technology.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  FWIW Wine can also install 32bit software with 16bit installers since it does support protected mode 16bit code (which is the vast majority of 16bit Windows code anyway). Also on modern 64bit Windows you can use https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/ https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/ to run some 16bit programs. It is hit and miss, but most 16bit installers work fine.
- rvp-x 7y ago
  Worth noting that removing 16bit support in windows is an enormous security win, because the DOS stuff relied on things that are really bad for security. 32-bit support is a lot more sustainable.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Citation needed. 16 bit code is fairly well isolated in NT-based Windows.
    - yegle 7y ago
      Wiki suggest 16bit of Address Space Layer Randomization can be bruteforced in minutes, citing source: Shacham, H.; Page, M.; Pfaff, B.; Goh, E.J.; Modadugu, N.; Boneh, D (2004). On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomization. 11th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. pp. 298–307.
      - 7y ago
davemp 7y ago
I’m not sure why valve doesn’t just ship a 64bit client with their own compatibility layer(s). There’s a lot of problems on various linux distros hunting down and setting up the correct 32bit libs. Windows is fine for obvious reasons, but valve already seems to want to move to a more platform independent approach.
- m45t3r 7y ago
  Valve already ships the equivalente of a whole Ubuntu 12.04 32-bits included in Steam to be used by games. I would really like if Valve could move Steam to use Flatpak or some other thing instead. Their bundled libraries are a mess and lots of time doesn't work correctly.
  - dylan-m 7y ago
    Someone even made an unofficial flatpak for Steam, too. It's on Flathub and it works great for my needs. Makes perfect sense with the way Valve packages Steam already, since they try really hard to provide the same environment on every distro. The only problem I have with it is you can't easily add additional library folders due to the sandboxing. (Need Valve themselves to add portals to the application code so Steam can pop up a native file chooser which grants access to whatever file the user chooses, and there's no directory tree portal anyway … yet). But that's solvable. Much better, long term, than Valve stubbornly clinging to whatever distro continues to build for an obsolete architecture at their own expense.
FrozenVoid 7y ago
32-bit closed source software won't be suddenly recompiled to satisfy some open source purity standard. People will stop using Ubuntu for games - and "linux has no games" will be a strong argument again. Gaming is a huge issue on linux that only recently was solved with Steam+Proton and Ubuntu team just decided to screw with it. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Just like Red-Hat a couple of years ago, Canonical has shifted focus to IoT and server support, because desktop Linux brings no money. I doubt they will be that much affected.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Or people will just get it as a snap.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    In a format that will be as dead as unity, mir, ubuntu phone, and upstart in a few years. Nothing that ubuntu strikes out on their own with ever works out.
    - deniska 7y ago
      upstart was an rhel thing
      - jononor 7y ago
        Upstart was originally developed by Canonical. Several years after it shipped in Ubuntu, it was shipped in RHEL6. RHEL7 replaced it with systemd. While it probably had some RedHat contributions, to call it a RHEL thing does not make much sense.
    - gnomewascool 7y ago
      Mir is actually still alive and being developed at Canonical. Ubuntu phone (the software stack of Mir and Unity8, running on Ubuntu, on phones, as opposed to a phone backed by Canonical) is still alive, usable and arguably the most mature of the FOSS "GNU/Linux on a phone" projects.
bangonkeyboard 7y ago
What about macOS Catalina, which also drops 32-bit support and has already caused games to become unavailable?
- empyrical 7y ago
  If they are dropping Ubuntu 19.10 over lack of 32 bit support, it's probable that they're going to drop support for Catalina and up as well. I don't think they've made a statement yet, however.
  - faho 7y ago
    Dropping support for Catalina would be akin to dropping support for macOS entirely, while dropping support for Ubuntu is not the same as dropping support for linux. In fact Valve already have their own distro, and it's not based on Ubuntu.
    - empyrical 7y ago
      Hmm, I've done some googling and it looks like Valve has a 64 bit version of Steam for macOS already. You may need to delete Steam.app and re-install to get it. So you will still be able to use Steam itself on Catalina+, but will need to wait for 32bit only games to have a 64 bit version made available (or for someone to come up with some kind of compatibility tool)
overgard 7y ago
Smart move by Valve IMO. Canonical is offloading a lot of work onto them if they continue down this road, and Valve easily has enough sway to convince people to use a new distro. I think it'd be a huge mistake for Canonical not to reverse their direction on this. The original decision was defensible when it wasn't obvious how many problems dropping 32 bit support would create, but obviously it's a big issue to a lot of their customers.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  I can't think of anything common it's an issue for outside of Wine and Steam, both of which have already been snap-ified before. For the corner cases of legacy 32 bit proprietary software which requires 32 bit system libs 18.04 will be supported until 2028. Other distro's have already went this route without the world burning down.
  - blihp 7y ago
    True, but Wine and Steam are very common use cases on the desktop. While both applications could probably go the snap route, I'm not sure they'd be up to taking on then entirety of the 32-bit stack support across all platforms which is what they'd effectively have to do (maintaining the 32-bit stack just on some platforms while using the provided versions on others would be more work for them) Canonical has, yet again, made a mistake here if they care about the desktop at all. Sure, 32-bit x86 hardware is pretty much obsolete. All 32-bit software? Not so much. Seems like the reasonable compromise would be to identify the subset of 32-bit packages/libraries needed to support Wine/Steam and continue to maintain those rather than the entire 32-bit version of the distro.
    - davidgerard 7y ago
      64-bit Wine runs 32-bit Windows binaries just fine.
      - reificator 7y ago
        With or without distro provided 32 bit libraries? Serious question, I actually don't know.
unixhero 7y ago
So a switch to OpenSuse or Fedora would make sense perhaps. I had a great time trying out OpenSuse.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Same here, but Fedora w/ Cinnamon. Gnome3 and similar are just so buggy for me.
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Linux distro is not the same as the window manager you tried
    - tomrod 7y ago
      Correct. Fedora was the distro I switched to. I found the standard WM (technically DE, but I'll allow it) to be slow and clunky, and it's performance improved with Cinnamon. I'm more of an openbox guy though.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Which one between openSUSE and Fedora is the most community driven? I'd rather see them break away from targeting a Linux distribution that is mainly funded from a company that gets their income from servers/cloud. They need to either go with a distro that has a desktop oriented company behind or with a distro that is community driven.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    Valve is currently maintaining SteamOS which is based on Debian, so why wouldn't they want to go with that? The Steam client is already in the Debian non-free repository.
    - unixhero 7y ago
      Hey what can I say. Good point!
walkingolof 7y ago
Wonder if this is really a problem in a few years, most gaming will probably stream from services like Google Stadia, gaming will be OS agnostic
- sbergot 7y ago
  Your confidence in stadia is impressive. I'm willing to bet that "most gaming" won't happen on streaming platforms anytime soon.
- mruts 7y ago
  There’s no way that’s going to be true. Many people including myself play games that require very low latency (overwatch, csgo) at resolutions (1440p or 4k) and fps (144) that I don’t think streaming will be able to do.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  In a few years, Stadia will be cancelled.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  I certainly don't want to live in that dystopia.
- anoncake 7y ago
  SASS is non-free software on steroids. If Linux gaming is viable, so is non-cloud gaming.
JohnTHaller 7y ago
Quite a lot of games on Linux rely on Wine to run. They are 32-bit Windows games packaged up with a 32-bit version of Wine. The 64-bit version of Wine still has quite a few bugs and really shouldn't be used for commercially sold software. Valve is making the correct decision here based on Ubuntu dropping 32-bit support. https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_there_a_64_bit_Wine.3F https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_there_a_64_bit_Wine.3F https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=win64&resolution=--- https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=win64&resolutio...
peter_retief 7y ago
I moved to Debian, increasingly found Ubuntu to be problematic
WhatIsDukkha 7y ago
As I mentioned in the other thread. I've switched to flatpak steam, works well and its working towards the sandbox this stuff should be in. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam For wine itself - https://winepak.org/ https://winepak.org/
kibwen 7y ago
Now that the WinRT scare has passed and Valve no longer fears Microsoft imposing an App Store-style hegemony over Windows, Valve has little external incentive to continue maintaining tools targeted at Linux users. The life raft is no longer strategically valuable, and 19.10 is a convenient cover for spinning down Ubuntu support. I wouldn't be surprised if this is followed up in a few months' time by an announcement that the internal Linux team is being dissolved altogether.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  Supporting Linux also inadvertently helped Google Stadia.
aNoob7000 7y ago
If this does happen and Valve pulls support for Steam on Ubuntu, I'm probably going back to Windows. This news is depressing since I've been a happy Ubuntu user for about a year now.
morsch 7y ago
I'm running Steam on a 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04. What changes with 19.10? I figured Canonical was only announcing the end of the i386 installer; presumably this is not about that?
- masterchill 7y ago
  They are dropping 32-bit app support entirely.
tolger 7y ago
This kinda sucks for me, as a Linux based developer who’s also a gamer. I’ve been gaming on Steam with the Proton compatibility layer, and most of my Windows-only games work flawlessly. If future Ubuntu upgrades break this, then I won’t upgrade until I find another solution.
qbaqbaqba 7y ago
Well done, Linux as a gaming platform will be dead.

175 points by MikusR 7y ago

The first consumer 64 bit processors came out a decade and a half ago. Why is legacy 32 bit still a thing? It's not like anyone can say they haven't had ample warning time that 32 bit deprecation was coming.

kabwj 7y ago
You can’t recompile executables you don’t have the source for.
- lozenge 7y ago
  This is Steam itself, not a game. If they don't have the source, they'll have to drop Mac support too.
  - the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
    The mac market is bigger and some companies are porting 32bit games to 64bit.
    - Zardoz84 7y ago
      nobody would port old games that don't give revenues. For example, if Paradox/Cerberos don't move a finger to fix a stupid annoying bug of a game that have like 6 years old (Sword of the stars), why hell they would port to 64 bits ?
  - tomxor 7y ago
    Surely this is steam by proxy, how can they claim to support a platform if none of the 32 bit games work? I mean they could also probably port steam to NetBSD, but i doubt any games would work, so they wouldn't claim to support NetBSD.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    It's obviously more about the games themselves than the client, which are much more difficult to update in many cases and offering only 64-bit games would, AFAICT, vastly reduce the number of available titles in the library.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      They already distinguish platforms, if they just recognize 32-bit and 64-bit as platform features and recognize that games might require support for either or both features, this would be almost a non-issue and they would be more future proof.
  - Illniyar 7y ago
    Steam has a lot of 32bit only games. And it relies on WINE to run them. I doubt they have 64bit version of all their popular games. That is why windows is king for so long - the thought of dropping backward compatibility is unthinkable. Instead you do horrendous hacks to get things to work (such as having two different system folders - 1 for 32 bit executables and one for 64bit executables)
    - bpfrh 7y ago
      Microsoft made a hardcut with drivers on windows 7/8. The same will be done eventually for 32bit, just not now.
      - jplayer01 7y ago
        Yeah, they're not going to drop 32-bit for the foreseeable future. They see the value in backwards compatibility, despite HN readers continuously criticizing them for the lengths they go to accomplish it, or straight up ignoring how much effort they've put into it. There's too much software that is only 32-bit, particularly in businesses, for it to be anything other than an ideological argument for "purity".
        thebitrot 7y ago
        doesn't microsoft also need to keep 32 bit windows so companies can run 16-bit software if they need to?
      - badsectoracula 7y ago
        Considering new software is released as 32bit only as recently as today, this "eventually" will only come if PCs stop using CPUs from the Intel 8086 lineage.
  - kabwj 7y ago
    I was replying to the comment outside of the context of this article.
  - Cyph0n 7y ago
    But the point of Steam is to play games, and Valve does not have the source for those games.
- Avamander 7y ago
  You can repackage them though.
Illniyar 7y ago
Steam for linux is heavily dependent on WINE. WINE has been reluctant to move to 64 bit because, as I understand it, it will mean that 32 bit executable(which are the majority of games they support, I think) won't be able to run with it[0]. At least that's how I understand it. It's more about the issues with backward compatibility then inability to create a 64bit version. [0]- https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147869.html https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147869...
- donio 7y ago
  Wine has had 64 support for ages. A typical wine installation is multi-arch, supporting both 64 and 32 bit windows programs which is very important because running older 32 bit only programs is a huge use case for wine. The post you linked seems to be about the difficulty of packaging the 32 bit support for 64 bit only ubuntu.
cyborgx7 7y ago
Video games are more media than they are software. Sadly their format is software but their release is media. Old games aren't actively supported and won't be updated. You need to ensure some kind of compatibility with 32 bit software or drop a huge amount of support for games. And if you don't, the video game industry will probably drop you. I think you will probably need some kind of compatibility wrapper you can wrap 32 bit binaries in that will make it compatible with 64 bit systems.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Makes sense. I guess this isn't close to anything like what I use Linux for, nor is it a core requirement of a modern Linux desktop. I'd be surprised if I'm running any executables on Linux that were compiled more than, say, a year ago. The Ubuntu release cycle is every six months, with a lot of software updated more frequently than that. And yeah, maybe the compatibility layer should be provided by Steam itself, rather than the OS. Could even just be a container or a thin VM. I don't see why it should be the OS's responsibility to continue supporting 32 bit executables indefinitely. Certainly that's not something I would want Ubuntu spending a lot of effort on, as it doesn't benefit your basic Linux desktop, server, or development use cases.
- needle0 7y ago
  This. Games are done when they're done; much like finished novels, films, or music, once the developer considers it done, it won't get updated anymore. Also likewise to film or music, if it ends up becoming a classic, it might get remastered or remade a decade or two later, but those are the exceptions rather than the norm. The vast majority of games will just stay like when they were originally made, much like the majority of novels, music, and film.
lostgame 7y ago
In media production, particularly film and audio, I am extremely dependent on, and enjoy far more more often than not - legacy plugins that may not even be manufactured any longer, or older versions I simply prefer. This is certainly not limited to the scope of media production. Heck, I even still keep a PPC iMac G4 with Tiger so I can play older Mac OS 9 games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Riven. The point is, many people prefer or are locked to older software that simply won't be updated for various reasons. When MacOS drops 32-bit support completely, I won't be upgrading. The warnings in Mojave are already bad enough.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  How are you able to even deal with modern encodings and resolution for film on a legacy machine?
  - lostgame 7y ago
    My late 2013 MacBook Pro doesn't have issues with Final Cut Pro 7 in Sierra, which I vastly prefer for a lot of projects. It can handle 1080 just fine, I'm not interested in 4K for my purposes at the moment. For me it's more older VST's - I also keep a copy of Logic Pro 9 around for that exact reason. I certainly don't edit film on my G4! little laugh
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
antisemiotic 7y ago
There are some reasons to keep software as 32bit, like these: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu... (tl;dr - bigger pointers mean higher memory consumption, they don't want to break third-party plugins, and they're porting to managed anyway). Also, either I'm misunderstanding something, or Ubuntu is throwing the baby out with the washwater here. For example, Arch was always aggressive about not supporting anything but the typical desktop at the time of release, but the 32bit packages are still in a separate repo if anyone needs them.
- mruts 7y ago
  Also aren’t 64 bit apps slower?
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Believe they are faster on amd/intel because of increased registers and new instructions.
overgard 7y ago
It wasn't really until windows xp died that you could reasonably expect to drop 32 bit support, and windows xp lasted forever. Mix that in with 64bit not providing much benefit if you weren't addressing more than 2GB of ram and it took quite a while for 64bit adoption to become the norm even though hardware support was present.
- mrighele 7y ago
  The first 64 bit release of Firefox for Windows [1] was Firefox 43.0 which was released at the end of 2015 [2] [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3015388/mozilla-finally-ships-64-bit-firefox-for-windows.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3015388/mozilla-finall... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/43.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/43.0/releasenotes/
badsectoracula 7y ago
There aren't many reasons to use 64bit if your program doesn't use much memory so if you stick with 32bit your program will use less memory (64bit pointers are mostly a waste of space) and run in more systems (those that for one reason or another cannot run 64bit code - note that this isn't just the CPU not being 64bit capable, firmware could also prevent 64bit support and some low end machines with 2GB of RAM could also come with 32bit Windows preinstalled which save both disk space - no 64bit libraries - and RAM).
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  End of support for 32 bit seems like a pretty damn good reason not to use it, I must say. It's better and simpler overall if everything is on the same page and you don't have to worry about compatibility issues; this gives more benefit than whatever marginal benefit exists for allowing small programs to run more memory efficiently.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    My comment was about 32 bit code in general, not just about Ubuntu. There is no end of 32 bit support, neither on Windows nor on Linux (the kernel itself can run even on a 486 IIRC) and AFAIK even macOS can still run 32 bit code. Of course individual distributions like Ubuntu can drop 32 bit support (and personally i do not see it as much of an issue since you can switch distributions and Valve can simply recommend one that doesn't arbitrarily break their users' programs), but that is just the distribution doing it. The kernel can still run 32bit code and with enough effort even 19.10 will be able to run 32bit programs, the whole hubbub is about avoiding that effort.
michaelmrose 7y ago
Nobody cares if 32 bit is outdated. People still care about running windows games on linux which are still mostly 32 bit including things released yesterday not 15 years ago.

CorvusCrypto 7y ago

I'm fine with this, but it is a bit annoying to see a developer not deal with 64-bit builds. I wonder if it's only because Windows allows them to be lazy while it generates more money for them? Either way I think valve's Linux team should rethink this. They depend on 32-bit libs, but Surely they can find alternatives for the 64-bit build and who knows it might even make the experience on Linux even better.

captainbland 7y ago
My guess is that there are a lot of third party developed games which only work on 32-bit compatible systems and Valve either doesn't know exactly which ones are which or simply doesn't want to put the effort into organising them such that users are warned about which specific games have incompatibilities. The other option is just letting the games that would only work on 32-bit compatible systems fail with cryptic error messages and have to field masses of complaints about it while looking extremely unprofessional in the process. In this case it's not that surprising that they would just decide to drop support, especially considering that Ubuntu is a relatively small chunk of the market to begin with. It's pretty unfortunate. I totally get Canonical's desire to get rid of the seemingly unnecessary bloat and maintenance burden from having to support 32-bit applications but this is the consequence and it's a big blow to gaming on Ubuntu, especially seeing as Steam has only been supported on Ubuntu since 2013.
- sunstone 7y ago
  Ubuntu makes its money from server and enterprise clients. If Valve needs to support 16/32 bit for its customers then it's up to them to do it. I expect Valve is a much bigger company than Ubuntu, maybe Valve can contract out this work to ... Ubuntu instead of just freeloading.
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Valve has contributed a ton of work to Ubuntu/Linux. They’ve pretty much single handedly turned around Linux gaming to the point where I can safely expect most windows-exclusive games on steam will run smoothly on Ubuntu. Freeloading couldn’t be farther from the truth.

mpartel 7y ago

I wonder if this statement is mostly an attempt to get Ubuntu to reverse course. It seems unwise to pull support from the most popular distro if it could be supported with additional technical effort, such as bundling the libraries with Steam. Of course that's effort that Valve would likely prefer to spend elsewhere.

wolco 7y ago
I think Ubuntu will lose its status as most popular distro after 19.
- asark 7y ago
  This whole thing has been pretty funny. Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work. Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games! Valve: ...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    That was after they realise that it boils down to 1% market size.
    - cwyers 7y ago
      Right. Valve wants gaming on Linux as a hedge against Microsoft. They are swimming in money from selling cosmetic items in TF2 and Counterstrike and DOTA. So they can subsidize a bunch of Linux development that has no short term revenue value because they view a single dependency on Windows as a threat to their Steam vig revenue. Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.
      - pvg 7y ago
        I think most of their revenue is from their distributor's cut - even Valve can't sell $3.5 billion worth of TF2 hats.

fabian2k 7y ago

One big issue from what I read are installers for Windows software running in WINE. The installers are often still 32bit, and without 32bit support they won't work anymore. So even if the actual Windows application is 64bit, you can't run it in WINE because you can't install it. This doesn't really surprise me, one big specialized software I used a while ago couldn't be installed under Windows 7 64bit because the installer still was 16bit. I don't think anyone wants to touch a still working installer unless they have to, so they stay behind in technology.

badsectoracula 7y ago
FWIW Wine can also install 32bit software with 16bit installers since it does support protected mode 16bit code (which is the vast majority of 16bit Windows code anyway). Also on modern 64bit Windows you can use https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/ https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/ to run some 16bit programs. It is hit and miss, but most 16bit installers work fine.
rvp-x 7y ago
Worth noting that removing 16bit support in windows is an enormous security win, because the DOS stuff relied on things that are really bad for security. 32-bit support is a lot more sustainable.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Citation needed. 16 bit code is fairly well isolated in NT-based Windows.
  - yegle 7y ago
    Wiki suggest 16bit of Address Space Layer Randomization can be bruteforced in minutes, citing source: Shacham, H.; Page, M.; Pfaff, B.; Goh, E.J.; Modadugu, N.; Boneh, D (2004). On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomization. 11th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. pp. 298–307.
    - 7y ago

davemp 7y ago

I’m not sure why valve doesn’t just ship a 64bit client with their own compatibility layer(s). There’s a lot of problems on various linux distros hunting down and setting up the correct 32bit libs. Windows is fine for obvious reasons, but valve already seems to want to move to a more platform independent approach.

m45t3r 7y ago
Valve already ships the equivalente of a whole Ubuntu 12.04 32-bits included in Steam to be used by games. I would really like if Valve could move Steam to use Flatpak or some other thing instead. Their bundled libraries are a mess and lots of time doesn't work correctly.
- dylan-m 7y ago
  Someone even made an unofficial flatpak for Steam, too. It's on Flathub and it works great for my needs. Makes perfect sense with the way Valve packages Steam already, since they try really hard to provide the same environment on every distro. The only problem I have with it is you can't easily add additional library folders due to the sandboxing. (Need Valve themselves to add portals to the application code so Steam can pop up a native file chooser which grants access to whatever file the user chooses, and there's no directory tree portal anyway … yet). But that's solvable. Much better, long term, than Valve stubbornly clinging to whatever distro continues to build for an obsolete architecture at their own expense.

FrozenVoid 7y ago

32-bit closed source software won't be suddenly recompiled to satisfy some open source purity standard. People will stop using Ubuntu for games - and "linux has no games" will be a strong argument again. Gaming is a huge issue on linux that only recently was solved with Steam+Proton and Ubuntu team just decided to screw with it. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

pjmlp 7y ago
Just like Red-Hat a couple of years ago, Canonical has shifted focus to IoT and server support, because desktop Linux brings no money. I doubt they will be that much affected.
zamadatix 7y ago
Or people will just get it as a snap.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  In a format that will be as dead as unity, mir, ubuntu phone, and upstart in a few years. Nothing that ubuntu strikes out on their own with ever works out.
  - deniska 7y ago
    upstart was an rhel thing
    - jononor 7y ago
      Upstart was originally developed by Canonical. Several years after it shipped in Ubuntu, it was shipped in RHEL6. RHEL7 replaced it with systemd. While it probably had some RedHat contributions, to call it a RHEL thing does not make much sense.
  - gnomewascool 7y ago
    Mir is actually still alive and being developed at Canonical. Ubuntu phone (the software stack of Mir and Unity8, running on Ubuntu, on phones, as opposed to a phone backed by Canonical) is still alive, usable and arguably the most mature of the FOSS "GNU/Linux on a phone" projects.

bangonkeyboard 7y ago

What about macOS Catalina, which also drops 32-bit support and has already caused games to become unavailable?

empyrical 7y ago
If they are dropping Ubuntu 19.10 over lack of 32 bit support, it's probable that they're going to drop support for Catalina and up as well. I don't think they've made a statement yet, however.
- faho 7y ago
  Dropping support for Catalina would be akin to dropping support for macOS entirely, while dropping support for Ubuntu is not the same as dropping support for linux. In fact Valve already have their own distro, and it's not based on Ubuntu.
  - empyrical 7y ago
    Hmm, I've done some googling and it looks like Valve has a 64 bit version of Steam for macOS already. You may need to delete Steam.app and re-install to get it. So you will still be able to use Steam itself on Catalina+, but will need to wait for 32bit only games to have a 64 bit version made available (or for someone to come up with some kind of compatibility tool)

overgard 7y ago

Smart move by Valve IMO. Canonical is offloading a lot of work onto them if they continue down this road, and Valve easily has enough sway to convince people to use a new distro. I think it'd be a huge mistake for Canonical not to reverse their direction on this. The original decision was defensible when it wasn't obvious how many problems dropping 32 bit support would create, but obviously it's a big issue to a lot of their customers.

zamadatix 7y ago
I can't think of anything common it's an issue for outside of Wine and Steam, both of which have already been snap-ified before. For the corner cases of legacy 32 bit proprietary software which requires 32 bit system libs 18.04 will be supported until 2028. Other distro's have already went this route without the world burning down.
- blihp 7y ago
  True, but Wine and Steam are very common use cases on the desktop. While both applications could probably go the snap route, I'm not sure they'd be up to taking on then entirety of the 32-bit stack support across all platforms which is what they'd effectively have to do (maintaining the 32-bit stack just on some platforms while using the provided versions on others would be more work for them) Canonical has, yet again, made a mistake here if they care about the desktop at all. Sure, 32-bit x86 hardware is pretty much obsolete. All 32-bit software? Not so much. Seems like the reasonable compromise would be to identify the subset of 32-bit packages/libraries needed to support Wine/Steam and continue to maintain those rather than the entire 32-bit version of the distro.
  - davidgerard 7y ago
    64-bit Wine runs 32-bit Windows binaries just fine.
    - reificator 7y ago
      With or without distro provided 32 bit libraries? Serious question, I actually don't know.

unixhero 7y ago

So a switch to OpenSuse or Fedora would make sense perhaps. I had a great time trying out OpenSuse.

tomrod 7y ago
Same here, but Fedora w/ Cinnamon. Gnome3 and similar are just so buggy for me.
- unixhero 7y ago
  Linux distro is not the same as the window manager you tried
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Correct. Fedora was the distro I switched to. I found the standard WM (technically DE, but I'll allow it) to be slow and clunky, and it's performance improved with Cinnamon. I'm more of an openbox guy though.
badsectoracula 7y ago
Which one between openSUSE and Fedora is the most community driven? I'd rather see them break away from targeting a Linux distribution that is mainly funded from a company that gets their income from servers/cloud. They need to either go with a distro that has a desktop oriented company behind or with a distro that is community driven.
- 0815test 7y ago
  Valve is currently maintaining SteamOS which is based on Debian, so why wouldn't they want to go with that? The Steam client is already in the Debian non-free repository.
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Hey what can I say. Good point!

walkingolof 7y ago

Wonder if this is really a problem in a few years, most gaming will probably stream from services like Google Stadia, gaming will be OS agnostic

sbergot 7y ago
Your confidence in stadia is impressive. I'm willing to bet that "most gaming" won't happen on streaming platforms anytime soon.
mruts 7y ago
There’s no way that’s going to be true. Many people including myself play games that require very low latency (overwatch, csgo) at resolutions (1440p or 4k) and fps (144) that I don’t think streaming will be able to do.
darkpuma 7y ago
In a few years, Stadia will be cancelled.
Nullabillity 7y ago
I certainly don't want to live in that dystopia.
anoncake 7y ago
SASS is non-free software on steroids. If Linux gaming is viable, so is non-cloud gaming.

JohnTHaller 7y ago

Quite a lot of games on Linux rely on Wine to run. They are 32-bit Windows games packaged up with a 32-bit version of Wine. The 64-bit version of Wine still has quite a few bugs and really shouldn't be used for commercially sold software. Valve is making the correct decision here based on Ubuntu dropping 32-bit support. https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_there_a_64_bit_Wine.3F https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_there_a_64_bit_Wine.3F https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=win64&resolution=--- https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=win64&resolutio...

peter_retief 7y ago

I moved to Debian, increasingly found Ubuntu to be problematic

WhatIsDukkha 7y ago

As I mentioned in the other thread. I've switched to flatpak steam, works well and its working towards the sandbox this stuff should be in. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam For wine itself - https://winepak.org/ https://winepak.org/

kibwen 7y ago

Now that the WinRT scare has passed and Valve no longer fears Microsoft imposing an App Store-style hegemony over Windows, Valve has little external incentive to continue maintaining tools targeted at Linux users. The life raft is no longer strategically valuable, and 19.10 is a convenient cover for spinning down Ubuntu support. I wouldn't be surprised if this is followed up in a few months' time by an announcement that the internal Linux team is being dissolved altogether.

jonny_eh 7y ago
Supporting Linux also inadvertently helped Google Stadia.

aNoob7000 7y ago

If this does happen and Valve pulls support for Steam on Ubuntu, I'm probably going back to Windows. This news is depressing since I've been a happy Ubuntu user for about a year now.

morsch 7y ago

I'm running Steam on a 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04. What changes with 19.10? I figured Canonical was only announcing the end of the i386 installer; presumably this is not about that?

masterchill 7y ago
They are dropping 32-bit app support entirely.

tolger 7y ago

This kinda sucks for me, as a Linux based developer who’s also a gamer. I’ve been gaming on Steam with the Proton compatibility layer, and most of my Windows-only games work flawlessly. If future Ubuntu upgrades break this, then I won’t upgrade until I find another solution.

qbaqbaqba 7y ago

Well done, Linux as a gaming platform will be dead.