I feel like there might be a ton of weird edge cases where people still need 32 bit libraries. Steam is just scratching the surface here. The first steps should always be a series of public announcements and discussions followed by a testing period where the packages get moved to a repo which is disabled by default.
It’s interesting that Steam still uses 32-bit. Why? Backward compatibility?
Games, native linux games and even 32 bit windows games
So we can translate Windows API calls to Linux but we can’t do the same from 32 to 64 🤔
Since Wine 9.0, you can run 32-bit windows apps on 64-bits directly, without the need for 32bits distro support. It’s called WoW64. You can read about it in here: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases/wine-9.0#wow64.
It’s not yet enabled by default and existing 32-bit prefixes needs to be recreated Arch is migrating to it
Native Linux games on Steam run on top of steam-runtime, a collection of libs (32 and 64 bits) running in a container called pressure-vessel. In theory they don’t need 32 bits distro support.
Steam Linux client itself is 32-bits. Unfortunately
Since Wine 9.0, you can run 32-bit windows apps on 64-bits directly, without the need for 32bits distro support. It’s called WoW64.
You can in some cases, but not all.
Wine has two forms of WoW64. Old WoW64 uses 32-bit libraries and has been around for a long time.
New WoW64 (first available in Wine 9.0 if built with a special option) works without 32-bit libraries, but is still incomplete. It cannot yet replace old WoW64 everywhere, and even where it can, it reduces performance in some APIs. (For example, OpenGL.)
It will eventually make sense to drop the old one, but doing so now would be premature.
Thanks for the info. Things looking promising.
As I understand Steam wants to be compatible with mainstream. Since they has released a native client for Mac Silicon, I think we may also see a 64-bit native Steam client. At least I hope so :)
It’s because of how memory works, that would be additional technically emulation level translation, since you woukd need to emulate 32 bit ram.
Note: this is just me guessing.
