Valve Offers Up New Privacy Settings For Steam Gamers

[Vistaus]

Yes and no, depends from how you look at it.

The 32-bit libs needed by it are placed inside its own bubble, not littering your system. That's what Flatpack does. Bundles stuff with their own dependencies inside of sandboxed environments that don't interact with the OS that much.

That's right. But the argument was that Valve should make the Steam client 64-bit. Sure, not littering your system with 32-bit libs is a nice feature that Flatpak allows, but again: the point was that the client should be 64-bit, not that 32-bit libs shouldn't litter the system.

[starshipeleven]

That's right. But the argument was that Valve should make the Steam client 64-bit.

The counter argument is that the only thing that really matters to someone that isn't just hating 32bit for sentimental reasons is littering the system with 32-bit libs, that can cause issues to the rest of the system.

Steam client won't run faster or better on 64bit, and it will still like and require its own libs at some specific version, and it will still remain a proprietary application that should really be sandboxed. Flatpacking it remains necessary even if 64-bit. So whatever, it's fine even at 32-bit.

[audir8]

I hadn't looked into flatpack before, or bubblewrap on which it's based. It does seem to provide some additional isolation, so I can see not turning off IA32_EMULATION completely off somewhat more palatable, but if I don't need it for anything other than gaming, why would I keep it if I'm not gaming?

Some of the features of the Steam client like remote play/capture/streaming (if available on Linux), could very well benefit from 64-bit, and games themselves could too. But this has been and continues to be a decades-long transition.

[starshipeleven]

I hadn't looked into flatpack before, or bubblewrap on which it's based. It does seem to provide some additional isolation, so I can see not turning off IA32_EMULATION completely off somewhat more palatable, but if I don't need it for anything other than gaming, why would I keep it if I'm not gaming?

As said above, it's a "just in case" thing. If you suddenly need to test or use a 32bit application (maybe a simple tool you find on github and you compile it) and then you would need to recompile the kernel.

That's one of the things I don't like of Gentoo, if something I install does not work then I need to waste time looking up what I compiled "wrong" and recompile it after I enable the features I disabled because "I didn't need them". For embedded-like systems (i.e. very specific usecase and it does not change) then it's fine.

Anyway that is probably an issue for a laptop and not for a mid-to-high end PC with SSDs, for Gentoo users anyway.

Everyone else does not usually recompile their own kernel so the point is moot.

[audir8]

I haven't needed IA32_EMULATION in a while on a laptop, though usually something will show up in dmesg if it's needed. Stable amd64 (not ~amd64) on gentoo is a lot better now than it used to be. Having ubuntu on a laptop and gentoo on a desktop, I would say I spend around the same amount troubleshooting things on both. On ubuntu I haven't yet had a completely successful upgrade from stable version to stable version for one reason or another (something with drivers usually), on gentoo it's a large enough unmasking from unstable to stable that might introduce a slot conflict (like a qt version bump). Initial configs on gentoo are sometimes harder, but they're more stable after ward I think.

[starshipeleven]

Having ubuntu on a laptop and gentoo on a desktop, I would say I spend around the same amount troubleshooting things on both. On ubuntu I haven't yet had a completely successful upgrade from stable version to stable version for one reason or another (something with drivers usually),

That's one of the reasons I don't like Ubuntu, too much half-assed things. Can I recommend OpenSUSE instead? You can upgrade from stable versions without issues (also to the rolling release and back) and even the rolling release is low-mainteneance.

Or even Linux Mint Debian (semi-rolling based on Debian testing)

[Vistaus]

The counter argument is that the only thing that really matters to someone that isn't just hating 32bit for sentimental reasons is littering the system with 32-bit libs, that can cause issues to the rest of the system.

Steam client won't run faster or better on 64bit, and it will still like and require its own libs at some specific version, and it will still remain a proprietary application that should really be sandboxed. Flatpacking it remains necessary even if 64-bit. So whatever, it's fine even at 32-bit.

It won't run better or faster, but it *will* save a lot of space without all those 32-bit libs.

[starshipeleven]

It won't run better or faster, but it *will* save a lot of space without all those 32-bit libs.

Are you confusing the multi-GB "ubuntu chroot" Steam uses to run games (doing more harm than good, and containing both 32 and 64 bit) with a few hundred MB at most for the 32bit libs needed by the launcher?

[audir8]

That's one of the reasons I don't like Ubuntu, too much half-assed things. Can I recommend OpenSUSE instead? You can upgrade from stable versions without issues (also to the rolling release and back) and even the rolling release is low-mainteneance.

Or even Linux Mint Debian (semi-rolling based on Debian testing)

Ubuntu LTS releases aren't bad at all. I really only trust the security of Ubuntu/Debian, Slax, Gentoo and Fedora/Redhat. Others are mostly no goes for me.

OpenSUSE is the distro that had reiser and now brtfs from Evil corp as the default.. and a board member who actually defended James Damore (and his "polished memo") for an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YzBBEyLZd4 (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board) no thanks. It's America, if it isn't free speech yet, it's about to be.

[Vistaus]

Are you confusing the multi-GB "ubuntu chroot" Steam uses to run games (doing more harm than good, and containing both 32 and 64 bit) with a few hundred MB at most for the 32bit libs needed by the launcher?

No. I'm using Solus, so I'm not talking about Ubuntu's implementation. Those 32-bit libs need a few hundred MB for Steam, sure, but I also use Wine which also needs 32-bit libs so all in all we're talking about >600 MB of 32-bit libs here. I know Wine can't really do much about it right now, so it would be great if Steam could do it so that it'd at least saves a few hundred MB's.