171
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
171 points (98.3% liked)
Linux Gaming
19997 readers
102 users here now
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
Resources
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
As reiterated by the OP, the proposal is just a proposal and was proposed with heaps of lead time probably because they expected it to be controversial.
As also mentioned, heaps of volunteer time is spent maintaining the packages where most are barely used (even for gaming).
However, it does not seem like there is a viable alternative. Many comments say the suggested alternative, WINE's WoW64, does not work for all games.
I can see both sides here. Fedora maintainers says "this is so much work!" and (mostly) gamers saying "But older games will stop working!".
The response from the Bazzite guy does seem overblown to me. I would think the first step is to work out the impact, as I haven't seen anyone quantify what proportion of games are affected and if there are alternatives like emulation.
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.
Yea dependency management without updates is like 80% of the work that goes into package maintenance
Ok but is that because of fundamental limitations, or just because of bugs?
One's easier to fix than the other.
If it works like real WoW64, then 16 bit applications won't work ever but 32 bit applications that don't work will be because of fixable bugs.
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.
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
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.
The two solutions I've seen presented in the thread for the Steam problem are to run Steam in a flatpak or a distrobox. I'm not sure if using distrobox has the same issues as flatpak.
The flatpak should still work. Though I agree it's a problem.
The flatpak has its own issues. Namely, that Steam was never meant to be run like that, so you run into bugs the native version doesn’t have.