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Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

Here's a summary of the themes discussed on Hacker News regarding the removal of 32-bit support, with direct quotes:

Technical Challenges with Graphics Drivers

A significant hurdle for dropping 32-bit support is the reliance on specific versions of graphics drivers, particularly for NVIDIA hardware. This necessity prevents applications (like games) from simply bundling their own 32-bit graphics libraries due to licensing and versioning issues, and it also poses problems for open-source alternatives like Mesa.

  • "libGL/libVK for OpenGL and Vulkan support is a big one, you need that to be fitting the exact version of your kernel Nvidia driver if you are using Nvidia cards." - holowoodman
  • "Of course all other vendors play nice with Open Source and Mesa libs, but especially for gaming, a lot of people unfortunately still buy Nvidia. Games cannot just ship their own 32bit libGL for reasons of license and versioning." - holowoodman
  • "BearOso: This wouldn't work well with Mesa, either." - BearOso
  • "On Windows, this is like telling game developers that they need to ship all the graphics drivers for their games. Let's skip the hassle for the developers' side. For the users, not only would that be a situation where you could no longer update your own drivers to fix problems, it would be a compatibility nightmare and likely introduce new problems because of interactions with the system drivers and kernel level." - BearOso

Maintenance Burden and Developer Effort

A central point of contention is whether the effort required to maintain 32-bit libraries is justified given the declining user base. Some argue that the burden is minimal and that distributions or projects can easily include these libraries, while others point to the significant development and testing effort involved in maintaining a full architecture.

  • "So they want Fedora and/or Valve to do their work for them. Gotcha." - dismalaf
  • "deafpolygon: Seems like an extreme response… other distros still exist. Plus they can still ship the 32bit binaries themselves. Fedora isn’t preventing you from using 32bit libs- fedora is just saying “hey we aren’t going to invest energy in maintaining something just 5% of our users use.” - deafpolygon
  • "prmoustache: Bazzite maintainers have access to the source code of these libs, they can totally compile and distribute 32bits versions of them." - prmoustache
  • "Title should really be: Bazzite maintainers don't want to make a slight effort to maintain stuff." - prmoustache
  • "intothemolem: It's absolutely this. They have the ability to put these into their build pipelines and include them. Or just grab the latest 32bit versions and just use those." - intothemild
  • "It's work for them surely. But it's not the end of the world. I think we have all solved much harder problems as software engineers." - intothemild

The Role of Legacy Software and Gaming

The discussion highlights that many users still rely on 32-bit libraries for older software and, crucially, for gaming platforms like Steam. Removing 32-bit support risks breaking these established ecosystems, even if modern development targets 64-bit.

  • "Most 32 bit dependencies would not need to be upgraded. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is for the graphics driver." - charcircuit
  • "A good compromise would be for Valve to support Flatpak for Steam, but if they can't be bothered to build a 64 bit Steam they sure don't want to bother with that" - qalmakka
  • "clefpolygon: ...Fedora isn’t preventing you from using 32bit libs- fedora is just saying “hey we aren’t going to invest energy in maintaining something just 5% of our users use.”" - clefpolygon
  • "rightbyte: I think the fundamental problem is that there are many different 5% groups and that you are very likely to be in some 5% groups." - rightbyte
  • "BearOso: I don't think this is very much about modern projects. Developers want to use 64-bit. It's more that removing the libraries breaks legacy 32-bit stuff that simply can't be updated." - BearOso
  • "The steam client should be upgraded, though. I understand it has to do with their ancient web view library not doing 64-bit, so they would have to change it and possibly mess up some of the layouts and overlays. But they went ahead and changed it on macOS anyway, so you know it can be done." - BearOso
  • "codedokode: What happens to old software? How do you run 32-bit Linux apps? How do you run 32-bit Windows apps like VST plugins (audio effects)?" - codedokode
  • "em-bee: if i understand this correctly, bazzite is like SteamOS but based on fedora. it needs 32-bit support to run wine and steam." - em-bee
  • "em-bee: ...i also think the change proposal is conflating two things: removal of support running on 32-bit machines or running in 32-bit mode on 64-bit machines, and removal of support for running 32-bit binaries in 64-bit mode. the example given, that eg cpython might drop 32-bit support should only affect the first. while wine and steam only need 32-bit support for running in 64-bit mode." - em-bee

Technical Advantages of 64-bit Architectures

Beyond legacy support, the discussion touches on the inherent technical benefits of 64-bit computing, including increased registers, improved performance, larger memory addressing capabilities, and better support for modern instruction sets like AVX and SSE.

  • "holowoodman: 32bit support isn't just bad bloat due to larger pointers. Only doing 32bit and not doing amd64/x86_64 is also leaving a lot of performance on the table:" - holowoodman
  • "x86 traditionally has very few registers to work with, amd64 gives you quite a few more general purpose registers, so your hand-fiddled assembler will be faster, and if you use compiled code, your compiler will have an easier time with optimizations, faster function calls due to more register arguments, less register-to-memory spills and more execution station parallelism." - holowoodman
  • "Memory use is also an important point, your 32bit application will be limited to at best 4GB per process, usually more like 2GB (due to the kernel/user boundary at 2/2GB, absent weird tricks)." - holowoodman
  • "And the newer processor features, especially SIMD stuff like AVX and SSE work better with 64bit registers, if they work at all. Many support libraries that can utilize SIMD only do so in 64bit versions. Some features aren't even available if the hardware is in 32bit mode." - holowoodman
  • "I think the real reason that especially game developers are opposed to amd64 is that they used to be stuck on 32bit on Windows for a long time and now have to be dragged into the future by force ;)" - holowoodman

Specific Distribution Decisions and User Impact

The conversation is framed around specific decisions made by distributions like Fedora, with users debating the implications of these choices. Concerns are raised about whether these decisions are well-communicated, considerate of all user groups, and if alternatives like containers or VMs are sufficient to bridge the gap.

  • "charcircuit: Nothing is stopping apps from shipping with 32 bit libraries if they need them. This isn't like what happened with ARM where processors dropped support for 32 bit code." - charcircuit
  • "dismalaf: That's a them problem..." - dismalaf
  • "cluckindan: Which is typically closed source, right?" - cluckindan
  • "qalmakka: That's always a good choice but 1. They need to also keep the multi arch support enabled in their kernels 2. Apps such as games and steam depend on Mesa, and you don't really want to ship Mesa" - qalmakka
  • "The proposal has been retracted, but I fully expect 32-bit to be removed in time." - wirybeige
  • "em-bee: ...but there is a lot of backslash on the change discussion: ... so i doubt this will happen until those issues are resolved." - em-bee

Alternatives for Running 32-bit Software

Several alternatives are discussed for users who still need to run 32-bit applications, including virtual machines (VMs) and containers, with the latter being highlighted as particularly relevant for platforms like Steam.