Bazzite founder might shutdown whole project if Fedora drops support for 32 bit packages

I'm wondering what the problem even is. I mean, can't you just put all the stuff relevant to 32 bit gaming into a 'retro-gaming' package and be like "there, now if you want updates, better find maintainers"?

If you have an old game, chances are you won't need many new features. Only problem could be other packages or the kernel becoming incompatible. I don't know how relevant that is in this instance.

WINE’s WoW64, does not work for all games.

Ok but is that because of fundamental limitations, or just because of bugs?

One's easier to fix than the other.

Older games? What are you talking about? They say in that thread that Valve doesn’t release 64bit versions of Steam. That means any games through Steam using the official client would be unplayable.

Same here. Nobara was too glitchy so I switched to Bazzite and love it so far. Sigh.

Dw, this will pass - there is too much passion in the project, and too many with stakes in it too. If it is installed on so many people's systems, we will have many people eager to see this continue also.

If it helps at all some of the comments in the linked discussion mentions it's at minimum a year out

Could Valve make Gamescope work with Flattpak ?

I was this 🤏 close to a reflexive downvote

Afaik Steam still heavily relies on 32-Bit. And bazzite's only purpose is Steam.

Yes, and from what I understood:

• Steam is still 32bit. Two-thirds of Bazzite's user base use the OS on handhelds requiring Steam's gaming mode front-end. Installing Steam as a flatpak removes the ability to boot into gaming mode, and so alienating two-thirds of Bazzite's user base.
• It will kill support for older games that are still 32bit. Wine's WoW64 isn't ready yet, and even so, building custom Proton for 32bit support (e.g. Including all the 32bit libraries inside of Proton itself) on top of the Proton provided by Valve is going to be very messy.
• OBS requires 32bit packages to capture video data from 32bit games. If 32bit is no longer supported, this'll kill streamers playing older games (OBS is probably the most widely used software by streamers and game recorders).
• It would kill VR on Bazzite, as VR still makes use of 32bit features (I'm not sure why or which ones, but that's what's said).

I went to Garuda

THERE'S DOZENS OF US, DOZENS!!

I go with CachyOs Ik ik the compiler optimizations only give a minor difference and maybe major in latency but am just comfy with it.
I just like how minimal is the distro

Isn't Garuda also based on Fedora?

Edit: I was thinking of Nobara.

Honestly go for EnOS. Garuda is neat and has a good default setup, but they've gone a little far with their modifications imo

I mean the answer is pretty easy: video games generally have a long shelf life and no maintenance at some point after they’re released.

Because there’s no incentive for valve to spend time on that i guess

what did you go with?

Probably a lot of time and work to do so, they've spent a lot of time learning what tweaks Fedora needs.

The only notable thing about Bazzite is that it's built on top of Fedora Atomic, making it immutable like SteamOS.

Without that, it's just a regular old distro with some opinions about which software should be preinstalled.

That would require redoing everything. It would be a massive project, and honestly since there’s already other gaming oriented distros out there, what would be the point? It’s not like Garuda or PopOS is shit.

You one to

What. The. Fuck.

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.

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.

the return of HoloISO never booting up

I should've figured people on Lemmy would love his content lol

Fedora and Red Hat are innovating image-based operating systems. Universal Blue builds on that work.

It would take effort to port that work to Arch. Arch is also a rolling distro, not updating means not getting security updates. Fedora's release cycle allows them to get more stability, they don't have to be using the latest version.

I used EndeavorOS in the past which was a successor to AntergOS, both arch based, with gui installer and easy nvidia driver setup, they both worked like a charm without any issues (unlike fucking Manjaro).

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.

I've appreciated endeavourOS's installer and defaults. It's Arch-based and has an option to install KDE/Plasma as the default desktop environment. I only back up my home directory, but I'm sure there's systemwide options, like btrfs snapshots (although that's a whole thing you'd need to test/verify). It's not an immutable distro. And, being Arch-based, it gets frequent updates. I've had a handful of issues from a package being too cutting-edge, but often it gets resolved within a few days at most with an update. Never had something totally break my system that I didn't cause myself (mostly symlink traversal). Just read up on pacman's flags (particularly -R flags, like -dd, -s, -n).

just try cachyos off a usb, it has a graphical installer, it boots into plasma off the usb, was easier than windows install

Garuda is built on the zen kernel and ships with KDE, I have been using it for a year now and it meets all my needs.

Bazzite is based on Universal Blue, which is based on Fedora Silverblue, which is the first immutable, atomic Linux distro. The immutable nature of Bazzite is the point of it’s existence.

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

Well, no. If it actually happens, Bazzite can’t exist. Valve only releases 32bit of Steam for the official client. If support for 32bit is removed from Fedora, then gamers won’t be able to use Steam on Fedora or its downstream distros.

Why would distro hopping be a good thing? I thought that was a problem, hoping from one distro to the next not settling on one. I always see people encouraging newbies to stick to one and learn how Linux works.

Until they distro hop back to Windows because they just want shit to work.

Nobara gave me a month to start

bazzite is a mineral that forms neat crystals. It used to be the first search result but the distro has the first page of search results now.

Nobody's throwing a tantrum. They're just saying they can't reasonably serve their purpose if they lose 32-bit support. A project so heavily based on other projects is subject to upstream whims, and they probably don't have the manpower to do anything about it.

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.

It's way too early to make that call. This is a proposal for collecting feedback. I am not sure if this has been proposed before, but I would guess you would make these proposals from time to time to gauge the feedback, and when you see support for keeping it fall to a low level you can finally make the jump. As one of the comments in the thread mentions, now might not be the right time but you can't keep supporting it forever. Eventually you push 32 bit apps into emulators like what happened with 16 bit.

Too early, as the other comment said... However, if this happens, I'd hope that the SteamOS desktop image will be officially available which seems pretty similar to Bazzite, but based on Arch instead of Fedora.

where we goin

watchu talkin bout mate