Canonical Developer Tries Running GOG Games On 64-Bit-Only Ubuntu 19.10 Setup

[the_scx]

What about NVIDIA? Or should I get rid of my NVIDIA GPU to play games on Linux? With NVIDIA drivers your NVIDIA GL libraries must match the drivers currently installed which means your flatpak should possibly contain all the released versions of NVIDIA GL libraries which ultimately means you cannot even include them in the first place.

I don't care about Ubuntu one single bit. Fedora has no plans of dropping i686 libraries. And I game in Windows anyways - basically zero issues.

Flatpak should handle this.
However:
- There were several problem with legacy drivers as Flathub developers doesn't pay much attention to them.
- Old AMD drivers are not supported.
- The same applies to the less known ones, such as these for VIA/S3G/Zhaoxin GPUs.
- Old Flatpak had a problem with multi-GPU setups. If I good remember, it was fixed in 1.3. However, most Linux distribution still have Flatpak 1.0 or 1.2, and 1.3 isn't even a stable release.
- To keep GPU drivers working, runtime extensions have to be constantly updated. The problem is that flatpak runtimes have a very short life. Freedesktop 1.4 (2015) was abandoned a long time ago. Freedesktop 1.6 (2017) is barely supported. If you are serious game developer, Flatpak is not solution for you. You should rather choose Steam, and then users could use Steam client from Flathub if they want to.

[Khrundel]

LOL.
Minor DE's developers: We don't want to maintain 1k lines of code to support wayland on nvidia proprietary drivers.
Phoronix commenters: No step back, we will stay with you and force nvidia to rewrite their drivers.
Sane minority: With questionable advantages Wayland offers to users and lot of additional problems, the outcome of this stand will be just additional decade for X11. Nvidia has more than half discrete GPU installbase.
Phoronix commenters: FU Nvidia, Wayland is the future! Be progressive, switch to AMD or use Nouveau, it is good enough for everyday using, games don't matter,

Canonical: we don't want to support ia32 packages for another 5 years. Be progressive, switch to AMD64, recompile your software.
Valve: we aren't happy, we will recommend another distro, but we will try to find some solution.
GOG: we don't care about linux. Find solution yourself.
Phoronix commenters: Oh no! 3 old games I've bought on GOG won't launch without lutris! FU Canonical with your "progress", I'm switching to another distro.

[oiaohm]

- Old AMD drivers are not supported.

Those drivers are the ones based off the ATI drivers and those are dead no longer work with current day Linux kernels. Anything not supported by the Mesa drivers that flatpak runtime of AMD is not support by the current day Linux kernels either. The reason why flatpak developers back in time did not bother fixing up the old AMD drivers back then is the AMD developers of them told them not to because they were going to cease to be functional.

The same applies to the less known ones, such as these for VIA/S3G/Zhaoxin GPUs.

None of those provide the performance for gaming.

- Old Flatpak had a problem with multi-GPU setups. If I good remember, it was fixed in 1.3. However, most Linux distribution still have Flatpak 1.0 or 1.2, and 1.3 isn't even a stable release.

Slightly off the multi-gpu fix was first released in 1.3.0 and then released again in 1.2.4. So yes the multi-gpu fix has been released in a 1.2 stable point release most distributions you can get 1.2.4 flatpak installed from a repository..

- To keep GPU drivers working, runtime extensions have to be constantly updated. .

This is Nvidia users. AMD kernel drivers and cards cope with older mesa libraries sending them stuff so those with AMD cards are not needing to update the runtime to have the program work. Upgrade runtime to improve performance yes is true with AMD but its not to keep stuff working if you have AMD card. Nvidia and AMD gpus are very different at this point.

Those with AMD Graphics cards are not having this large problem. Even the new Navi from amd include means to handle bytecode from the older generations.

The problem is that flatpak runtimes have a very short life. Freedesktop 1.4 (2015) was abandoned a long time ago. Freedesktop 1.6 (2017) is barely supported. If you are serious game developer, Flatpak is not solution for you. You should rather choose Steam, and then users could use Steam client from Flathub if they want to.

Some of the reason why freedesktop runtimes have such short life span is the fact there are not many applications left on the old runtimes. You can force application set to old flatpak runtime to attempt a newer one and 1.4 to 1.6 to 18.08 at each of these steps it been very rare applications that have not migrated to newer. By only have ABI stable libraries in the freedesktop runtime have see high rates straight up conversion. To the point in very short time it came next to impossible to find even old freedesktop 1.4/1.6 runtime using applications run with 18.08 runtime without any issues. Once you have no applications need it any more it makes sense to abandon it.

[ElectricPrism]

There needs to be a Ubuntu Devs meme where they are sitting around a round table and are like What Terrible Idea Can We Come Up With This Year?

It's not that 64-bit shouldn't overtake 32-bit in the app / game space, but in the library space it's not a sane solution.

As these problems come up and with developments in ARM, POWER9, RISC I am beginning to think that binary distros are not the way.

What I'm afraid of is what it will cost to switch to a source package manager distro -- I am under the impression that even Gentoo has some ideology and thinking in implementation form that is stuck in 2008.

It's a shame Ubuntu couldn't learn a lesson from Gobo Linux where they organize packages /Programs/X-Library/V.XX/[files] -- if Linux took a page from their book we would have never needed Snaps or Flatpaks because multiple dependency versions could co-exist, and on servers where security matters they could simply require the latest version or have a secure channel of approved versions completely mitigating the necessity of LTS and having the best of Rolling Release and Point Release stability and freshness all while eliminating the necessity to over-engineer solutions that never should have needed to exist to begin with.

[humbug]

Valve is currently looking for a new distro around which to focus their Linux desktop gaming efforts. Currently they focus their testing and support around Ubuntu, but it will be dropped in favour of something else.

https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698

Qhttps://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...622_053640.png

quite a lot of options for them to choose from. They should pick something which uses fairly up-to-date kernels.

[Adarion]

Well, what a surprise it didn't work. Aww, if just someone had warned us before!


God bless Gentoo, again. It's all about choice and one can do pure amd64, x86_32 or the multilib approach (which is likely most suitable for desktops). A bit "overhead", but you still remain x86_32 backward-compatible.

AMD's amd64 didn't just win because it was a 64 bit thingy, it won because it was backward-compatible. At that time noone would have thrown away all his/her equipment, the entire software stack (incl. all the W32 users + 3rd party drivers for HW and thus also the HW that wouldn't receive new drivers). But AMD was smart enough to have it run your SW smoothly and with nearly the same performance than native 64bit code.

One could run a VM these days for "old" school gaming, but a qemu VM isn't lightweight as DOSBOX (which runs even on my Geode LX800). You have a complete Distro installation to keep there, need much more RAM and CPU power and you usually don't have a good graphics implementation. So - at least currently - that isn't a viable solution.

[Guest]

I guess Ubuntu really wants it's current users to switch to any other distro that has multilib packages. I'm surprised it wasn't obvious they're shooting themselves in the foot.
I'm not saying that it's fine to allow 32-bit software forever, and there's a time when you should move on, but there's always a transitionary period before you can drop legacy stuff.
Also, there should be some solution with the intention to stay around forever, as some software won't be updated to work in 64-bit setups.

[JPFSanders]

I can't believe Canonical is this stupid, Canonical is made of many people and I refuse to believe all of the technical staff is this retarded to make a decision like this (Dropping 32 bit app support, dropping pure 32 bit install is fine)

This is enemy action, someone has planted this idea on Canonical to cause intentional damage.

You can't have a desktop OS without 32 bit support and expect it to gain any traction in the Desktop market.

You can't expect to make any gains on the server market without a desktop os where to try your shit on.

There is plenty, I repeat plenty, lots of 32 bit business applications, even moar than you imagine.

Games and Wine are the most visible parts of a sharp Iceberg under the surface.

There has been a steady adoption on Linux desktops among corporates, it is all not very well in sight because those Linux desktops are run by "Unix Persons" (See 'bird person' from Rick and Morty to get the joke) I know plenty of people whose ability to run Linux at work is tied to Wine to such a degree that they will drop Ubuntu in a Snap. I also know people whose livelihood is dependent on running closed source 32 bit payment gateway libraries.

Those 32 bit apps and business do not care whether we geeks consider 32bit obsolete or done or what not, they care that these need to run for the foreseeable future. Microsoft more than anybody else in the world understand this and this is why they consider backwards compatibility number 1 priority.

Hint, If I was running Linux Mint I would be planning to step-up and prepare infrastructure to brace the impact and seize the opportunity to become the de-facto Ubuntu replacement because unless Canonical issues a 180 degree retract and guarantees they maintain multilib FOREVER AND EVER people will jump ship quickly.

I'm still baffled that Canonical are this stupid ignorant or retarded, there's the shadow of the hand of enemy action here.

[JPFSanders]

Another thought, for those thinking that this issue is Game stuff mostly and that is not serious, take note of this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/18/video-game-industry-is-booming-with-continued-revenue.html

So Canonical is opting out of what is one of the big cash cows of the IT world.

Facepalm, facepalm, facepalm.

[Britoid]

How many times I have to tell that Flatpak is not a solution here? It is just not suitable for everything.
https://github.com/flathub/flathub/p...ment-405826821

No it's not, it's never going to handle anything that needs to modify the host in some way. But for the vast majority desktop applications it should be fine.

That issue is also nearly a year old and the Flatpak is still there, although being maintained officially it would be in a much better state.