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[–] 11 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

This is bigger than it sounds for distros. The 32-bit Steam client was the main reason a lot of distros kept full 32-bit library support around. Ubuntu tried to drop i386 back in 2019 and walked it back largely because of Steam.

Older 32-bit games will still need those libraries, so multilib isn't going away tomorrow, but at least the client itself stops being the reason. And running it inside the runtime container should mean fewer "works on Arch, broken on Fedora" kinds of issues.

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  • It really is! I think last year Fedora proposed dropping 32-bit and things almost got heated between them and Bazzite because of Steam still needed it. I forget why the Flatpak version of Steam didn't suite their needs, but I remember they had very good reasons why it wouldn't be an option to switch to.

    I think with the option of running Steam on top/within of the new runtime would mean that they could drop multilib since the runtime can now provide it for the Steam Client (but dont quote me on that, the discussion i read is a little hazy).

    Im really excited for the runtime change too, as a NixOS user, theres a bunch of weird issues that pop up due to the PATH thats a pain and time consuming to troubleshoot, rebuild, and test again. Everything is ironed out for normal stuff, but some of the things with 3rd party launchers or mods are messy.

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