Bazzite Would Shut Down If Fedora Goes Ahead With Removing 32-Bit (gamingonlinux.com)
- Reference: 0178184044
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/2042242/bazzite-would-shut-down-if-fedora-goes-ahead-with-removing-32-bit
- Source link: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/bazzite-would-shut-down-if-fedora-goes-ahead-with-removing-32-bit/
He continued: "It's also causing irreparable damage to Fedora from a PR standpoint. I have been inundated all day with people sharing news articles and being genuinely concerned Steam is gong to stop working on their Fedora/Bazzite machines. I would argue not only should this change be rejected, the proposal should be rescinded to limit further damage to Fedora as a project. Perhaps open a separate one to talk about changing build architecture to build fewer 32-bit packages?"
When pushed further, Gospodnetich said: "I'm speaking as it's founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project."
[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/bazzite-would-shut-down-if-fedora-goes-ahead-with-removing-32-bit/
[2] https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f44-change-proposal-drop-i686-support-system-wide/156324/78
Why not just move to a different distro.... (Score:3)
I don't know a lot about this project but I am not understanding why they wouldn't just move to a non-Fedora based distribution. There are *LOTS* of them.
Re: (Score:3)
The whole point is that Bazzite is the Red Hat-based gaming distro. If Bazzite used another distro, it would really be something else entirely and likely be somewhat duplicated effort.
What I don't get is why they can't do their own packaging of 32 bit libraries? I assume that what Bazzite devs do is mainly packaging, so why not also package this thing that your distro needs to work?
"The whole point is that Bazzite is the Red Hat... (Score:1)
If that is the whole point, they could mention that on their [1]https://bazzite.gg/ [bazzite.gg] page? I can't seem to find it....
[1] https://bazzite.gg/
Re: (Score:2)
I guess they don't say it like I did, but there are about 8 references to Fedora on their site, they're clearly based on Fedora.
Re: (Score:2)
There's no technical reason to lock their platform to Fedora. If they are that tightly coupled to Fedora, they should rethink their design. Linux is the platform, software should target Linux, not just one distro.
Re: (Score:2)
Building a Linux distribution requires a fair amount of infrastructure, and that's something that's pretty different from distro to distro (and not all make all the necessary tooling public). Changing to a different base distro would most likely require a significant rework, and may be more than someone, especially someone who has mastered the intricacies of one distro's tooling, wants to do.
Yocto Distro Framework (Score:2)
They could just use Yocto to handle building their distribution. Granted that customization of a Yocto distribution can sometimes be mildly painful, but once setup shouldn't be too hard to maintain.
Re: (Score:1)
Bazzite is based not on the regular Fedora but rather the Fedora Silverblue distribution, which is an immutable/atomic operating system built on top of rpm-ostree. Maybe the Bazzite team could create something similar from a NixOS base instead, but they really would have to start their work all over from scratch (as far as making an OS fork fits that wording).
Re: (Score:2)
> I don't know a lot about this project but I am not understanding why they wouldn't just move to a non-Fedora based distribution. There are *LOTS* of them.
Or fork Fedora, right?
"Fedora is making headway in gaming space" (Score:2)
This person is delusional.
Re: (Score:2)
> This person is delusional.
The whole parent project is at the intersection of cloudy devops and Linux desktop woo woo
Why would a distro change kill a linux project? (Score:2)
Is this person not aware of the 10000 other distributions? If this project is solely to play games on fedora and somehow not any other distribution then I doubt it is any great loss. And if you can't make changes so that it runs on another distro then I have a hard time believing the project does anything useful because you would have to be incredibly dense.
Perhaps it is vibe coded and they need to get on the AI's good side to get these changes done or whatever.
Slackware (Score:3)
Slackware is the stable distribution they're looking for.
Re: (Score:2)
EXACTLY what I was going to say, my good sir!
Good to see a fellow Slackware user in the wild :)
Is weird that LinuxSteam is still 32 bit (Score:2)
After all, the steam client on Mac is 64 Bit, and porting from BSD-ish to Linux should be relatively easy, dobly so because the Steam client is based on chromium which has both 32 and 64 bit clients.
Granted, Valve took their Sweeeeet time moving the Mac Client from 32 to 64 bits, but hey, it was doable....
Re: (Score:2)
RIP TF2 Mac client.
Advise to Bazzite: ReBase the distro (Score:3)
Bazzite based on Fedora:
Take inspiration from linux mint. Mint is based of Ubuntu, but they also have a Linux Mint Debian Edition for the sole purpose of validating that, if needed be because ubuntu does something they do not agree with, they can move to debian and keep operating.
Maybe is time to do the same. Rebase the project on another distro. Not necesarily Debian, but something more tenable for your purposes.
IS a perfectly sensible move from Fedora (Score:3)
Fedora's raison d'etre (sorry for the lack of accents), is to be a testing ground of the future evolution of RHEL, I believe that, by the time RHEL11 lands, the RHEL ecosystem will not need 32bit libraries or executables for that matter.
So, better not waste the scant resources RH destines to Fedora in making 32 bit happen. Instead, lobby Valve to move the steam client from 32 to 64Bits.
JM2C YMMV
Not clear (Score:1)
According to distrowatch, the last 32 bit version was Fedora 25 in 2017. Apparently this means that Fedora would also stop providing 32 bit libraries that are frequently available for 64 bit Linux systems.
Re: (Score:2)
They are referring to multiarch support (as debian calls it). The OS itself is 64-bit, but all the infrastructure to run older 32-bit binaries (including win32 exes on Wine) is available in the repos. Fedora has always packaged 32-bit rpms even right up until Fedora 42.
Now in this case they are referring to Fedora Silverblue, not the normal rpm-based distro everyone knows about. Obviously Silverblue has some kind of 32-bit multiarch support, which Fedora is planning to eliminate.
Re: Why is 32bit needed? (Score:2)
Steam.
Re:Why is 32bit needed? (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody makes or sells 32-bit systems anymore, but despite this many people make and sell 32-bit games, or (even worse) games that require a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit libraries. Because of this, Wine and Proton have to also do the same thing, and the basic development culture of doing this even infected the Linux Steam client itself, which requires a mix of at least some of both types of libraries as a bridge to graphics drivers and certain system libraries. Even current 64-bit copies of Windows still keep and maintain a set of 32-bit libraries and general compatibility because Windows developers seemingly can't be arsed to figure out the difference. Gentoo made this change a couple years ago and it pretty much ended their consideration as a gaming distro overnight, and as far as I understand it, the Gentoo leadership did this specifically to isolate themselves from the gaming crowd and their contingent support requests. It would be pretty dumb for Fedora to do the same unless they were expecting the same results, but I can't speak for their leadership's intentions or awareness in this matter.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not a gamer, but Gentoo has Multilib support of x32_abi concurrently to 64 bits. Wine-proton is officially supported, and there is a gaming section in the forum. What does not work?
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks, and sorry for the misinformation, I've gotten these two incidents munged together in my head: Funtoo reportedly ended multilib support, while Gentoo merely deprecated a particular multilib implementation they were using but have since reportedly replaced it. (Twice?)
Re: (Score:1)
That's precisely what would break.
This isn't about shipping a 64bit distro, this is about removing that compatibility layer for 32bit applications.
You might have a hard time finding a 32 bit computer these days, but tons of programs are still compiled under 32 bit so they can run on both 64 bit and 32 bit systems, especially when dealing with windows programs, where you might want to run say, your old video games from back in the day.
It's currently depreciated in Rhel 10, so not recommended, but still there
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't x32 a different system from ix86? I was under the impression x32 was basically "Use the amd64 ISA, but with 32 bit addresses to save memory and memory bandwidth." (Needless to say this ABI isn't compatible with Steam, Win32 binaries, or anything else that needs ix86 instructions)
That seems to be confirmed by this: [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] But it could be Gentoo is using it to refer to ix86-32?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI
Re: (Score:2)
I mangled the names. Gentoo supports 3 concurrent options: abi_x86_64, abi_x86_x32 and abi_x86_32. The middle one is the one you describe ("mostly aims to mix the advantages of amd64 ABI with 32-bit pointers"), and the latter is "the 32-bit x86 ABI that is compatible with applications and libraries written for plain x86 CPUs." [1]https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M... [gentoo.org]
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Multilib/Concepts
Re: (Score:2)
Ah OK, thanks! Thought it odd, and Gentoo seems like the one OS that would have full support for x32 (and potentially could be less bothered by ix86 support) so I thought I'd ask!
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not sure it was really fair to mod this down... it was a relevant question.