Bazzite founder might shutdown whole project if Fedora drops support for 32 bit packages
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Throwing a tantrum isn't how to get what you want. This is a common behavior in the OSS world from wannabe BDFLs. Linus Torvalds or Guido van Rossum earned that title through merit, not through the simple luck of your side project going viral.
Bazzite is just Fedora Atomic with some extra preinstalled software. If it dies, it'll hurt the community of Linux gamers who picked it for whatever reason, but it won't make Fedora maintain 32 bit packages forever.
I'm not sure exactly what you expect of him?
It's not a tantrum, just a statement of limitation. The primary reason for Bazzite to exist is to have a SteamOS-like Fedora. He mentions, in depth, how the 'simple' answer about using flatpak doesn't work, because flatpak imposes isolation in ways that are incompatible with the use case.
His options seem to be to be "polite" and quiet right up until the change gets approved and implemented and only then yank the rug out from his community, or make the broader community know the implications of removed 32-bit userspace support.
This seems to be the whole point of soliciting feedback, to know what you are likely to break. It would be supremely odd if you make a proposal, solicit feedback, and call any mention of a bad consequence a 'tantrum' when that was the whole point of framing it as a proposal.
Seems like he needs either Steam to go 64-bit or for Fedora to keep 32-bit since flatpak can't help and, presumably, he doesn't want to try to take on the maintenance burden of trying to carry forward Fedora's 32-bit rpms for the same reason Fedora is trying to get out of carrying them forward. Assuming the broad community decides Fedora 32-bit userspace is still needed, then it's far less incremental work for Fedora to maintain along 64-bit than it is to independently add it back.
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Yeah most 16 bit stuff is old enough that there's already a mature reimplementation of the game engine or old enough that it'll run nicely in a translation layer or VM
From what I've seen if an online store provides a 16 bit classic without a reimplementation, it's bundled with dosbox.
Of course, I'm pretty much blanking on any classic Win16 titles of note. As far as I recall the significant games just kept being DOS games with at most launch from icon. I suppose original Myst because QuickTime, but they released a Win32 build. But this 16 bit stuff was a speculation, this is about the 32 bit stuff that isn't reasonably accommodated without a 32 bit runtime and certain bits being at odds with Flatpak isolation architecture.
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Hear me out... But should we be asking why there are so many things, steam included, that are still on 32b libraries?
Because there’s no incentive for valve to spend time on that i guess
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For those that think the response is overblown, from the thread:
These images are intended to be a drop-in replacement for Steam Deck OS for handheld console-like gaming PCs like the Steam Deck (Lenovo Legion Go, ASUS ROG Ally, MSI Claw, and other hardware in the same space).
These are also to be used to create gaming theater PCs, for streamlined use on a living room television.
The issue with “just using Flatpak or a container” is that the gamescope compositor simply does not work in those situations, when paired with Steam’s Gaming Mode, as it has the same concerns as a desktop environment. There would simply be no way to serve Gaming Mode as an environment.
As such, moving to this would essentially force Bazzite, as a project, to abandon its primary reason for existing - alienating 2/3s of their userbase. The remaining 1/3s would be served a lesser experience for a variety of more paper cut reasons, and VR is already a complex topic which would get even worse.
It's a big deal because disallowing the native steam build would make it nearly impossible to run bazzite in a SteamOS-like experience (which accounts for 2/3s of bazzite's users)
Could Valve make Gamescope work with Flattpak ?
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Note that this is just a proposal that the Fedora community wants feedback on.
Even if it does go ahead, this is minimum 1 year away from happening.
Tbh I wouldn't be surprised if this was meant as a "hurry up and move away from Steam still being a 32-bit app, Valve!" bit of brinkmanship.
I thought the Steam Linux client was already native 64-bit?
If not, maybe this is the kind of push needed to get them to actually go full 64-bit? -
It seems to me that 16-bit applications are already basically broken with 32-bit wine if you're running a 64-bit kernel, by default it places extra restrictions over what the hardware already does to prevent apps from loading 16-bit code entirely.
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#16-bit-applications-fail-to-start
Guessing that's why they don't feel it's that important to continue supporting, seems a VM is the future for these apps.
AFAIK, you couldn't run 16-bit software on native Windows x64, so Wine is exhibiting the same behavior.
Anyway, these 16-bit softwares are old enough that running them in DOSBox or something like that won't show any significant performance penalty through emulation vs translation.
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God fucking damnit, I finally find a Linux OS that gels with me and I find this shit....
If this happens, give Fedora itself a try. The only issue I've had with it is that my video card drivers didnt work right out of the gate and took a little bit of playing to get perfect.
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See. This is why I game only on Windows. There’s never any controversy or issues there. /s
I’ll see myself out now.
I was this 🤏 close to a reflexive downvote
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If this happens, give Fedora itself a try. The only issue I've had with it is that my video card drivers didnt work right out of the gate and took a little bit of playing to get perfect.
Fedora is literally the source of this problem. Bazzite is based on Fedora.
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How feasible is rebasing bazzite onto a different distro?
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I thought the Steam Linux client was already native 64-bit?
If not, maybe this is the kind of push needed to get them to actually go full 64-bit?wrote last edited by [email protected]It’s still 32bit. i’ve heard it guessed that Valve does this on purpose because so many games are still 32bit and Wine/Proton/etc aren’t fully compatible yet. What does it matter if Steam works and most of the Steam library does not.
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If this happens, give Fedora itself a try. The only issue I've had with it is that my video card drivers didnt work right out of the gate and took a little bit of playing to get perfect.
Been with fedora for years, but fedora is the problem, so that would be pretty pointless.
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How feasible is rebasing bazzite onto a different distro?
They fact they based it on Fedora in the first place seemed like a stupid choice, but I've been biased against Fedora for a long time lol.
IMO they should have based it off Arch or Ubuntu to align with the Steamdeck or SteamOS
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AFAIK, you couldn't run 16-bit software on native Windows x64, so Wine is exhibiting the same behavior.
Anyway, these 16-bit softwares are old enough that running them in DOSBox or something like that won't show any significant performance penalty through emulation vs translation.
I always thought it was purely a hardware limitation, but reading up on it I found it's actually just "virtual 8086 mode" that was dropped, 16-bit protected mode is still available even when running the CPU in "long mode".
So it rules out DOS apps, but 16bit Win 3.x apps should still run. But it's probably a compatibility minefield, and even MS decided it wasn't important (iirc the only thing they kept around was support for 16-bit app installers, but by internally swapping them out with 32-bit versions when run, since it was apparently common for 32-bit 9x apps to still use 16-bit installers so they could show a proper error message when run under Win 3.x)
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Yeah, no I'm aware of their history. More to the point it has little to nothing to do with Bazzite being negatively effected by Fedora dropping support for 32 bit. It's not like 32 bit Fedora systems are keeping American immigrants from being deported and by deprecating them IBM is returning to their Nazi roots
it's about using a platform that's owned by a corporate entity that will do anything for more profit.
IBM is known for doing whatever they want, whenever they want.
I have zero sympathy for a project that leverages tooling from a vendor with the kind of reputation IBM has.
that said, someone better suited for the project will fork it and it will carry on, just might lose some momentum.
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The underlying system is managed by OSTree, which handles the entire system instead of individual packages. You cannot simply change any part of the system, it’s all or nothing. This means stability, security, and effortless rollbacks if anything goes wrong. If you really want to tinker, you can create layers that sit on top of the base system, but it still doesn’t modify the system. It’s a very different way of thinking about how the system works. It’s like working with containers.
Man that sounds so nice for my laptop.
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It’s still 32bit. i’ve heard it guessed that Valve does this on purpose because so many games are still 32bit and Wine/Proton/etc aren’t fully compatible yet. What does it matter if Steam works and most of the Steam library does not.
Seems like a good reason for the Wine / Proton WoW64 subsystem to improve.
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They fact they based it on Fedora in the first place seemed like a stupid choice, but I've been biased against Fedora for a long time lol.
IMO they should have based it off Arch or Ubuntu to align with the Steamdeck or SteamOS
I've been biased against Fedora for a long time
Could you explain why?
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They fact they based it on Fedora in the first place seemed like a stupid choice, but I've been biased against Fedora for a long time lol.
IMO they should have based it off Arch or Ubuntu to align with the Steamdeck or SteamOS
I dunno, the concept of an immutable OS is definitely interesting, and I don't believe Arch or Ubuntu currently offer that.
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Bazzite is still currently a great distro.
If Fedora drops support for 32bit packages, Steam, Proton, and more will no longer work, and all Fedora derivatives become useless for gaming.
Other than Bazzite, openSUSE Tumbleweed and Kubuntu Minimal are both great choices.
If Fedora drops support for 32bit packages, Steam, Proton, and more will no longer work, and all Fedora derivatives become useless for gaming.
That is until Valve make the Linux Steam client proper 64-bit (which hopefully will happen sooner than later), and Wine/Proton don't have to depend on 32-bit/multilib at the Linux host level, that's what the WoW64 subsystem is for.
That will definitely break Linux-native 32-bit games though.
