Valve Reaffirms Commitment To Linux While Also Releasing Updated Proton

[oiaohm]

What the Enterprise market has an interest on depends on each segment, what if I need to control hardware that requires 32bit drivers to control some industrial process?

I work from time to time remaking those drivers. Mostly because they fail work any more due to kernel changes. For long term stability when ever you find something like that and it Linux you normally need planning to replace those as legacy.

The only exception I make on 32 bit drivers is 32 bit RTOS usage. Not Linux. Do note you don't have 32 bit kernels any more.

Maybe you mean 32 bit interface libraries. I have to replace some of those with new versions in 64 bit because you guess right they need to be updated so they were not security flawed by the intel cpu bugs and horrible the instructions you need to patch over bugs are only in the x86_64/AMD64 ISA.

Multilib is not a trade off, 32bit is not deprecated or obsolete, and having /lib32 (5.8M) on disk is not harming the performance of my computer not clogging my storage. It does enable me to run applications I could not otherwise run and will force me to run anything other than Linux

It is a trade off. You are trading away performance and security. 32bit x86 need to be deprecated due to the faults intel and others have made. Problem is you are clueless what you are trading away.

As an anecdote; you sound like some people I have interviewed over the years who told me Email was an anachronic obsolete messy thing that was going to go the way of the dodo and dissappear because now we have IM. The funny part was mentioning over the course of the interview that part of these people's role was to maintain a critical system containing an email relay that is essential to the company. Ah the faces.

No you are like a person trying to say bitcoin will be a world currency.

We are seriously to the point that everywhere you find 32 bit x86 has to be considered legacy and plan to remove/deal with has to be made. Deal with has to include extra security because we know the stuff is busted.

[r_a_trip]

It depends on how old of game the old 32 bit dos games using 32 bit dosbox those can be ported across to 64 bit by changing out dosbox.

You are forgetting that most 32 bit games and programs are Win32 dependent, which is not 16 bit DOS. The majority of Linux software has made the transition to 64 bit already, save some gems from Loki and the like.

[dungeon]

We are seriously to the point that everywhere you find 32 bit x86 has to be considered legacy and plan to remove/deal with has to be made. Deal with has to include extra security because we know the stuff is busted.

We seriosly need to believe in new CoC as 128bit is future...

Why do you beleive in 64bit at all then when they did crap once anyway. Smart people can't be fooled twice isn't it it is mush better to believe them nothing and to hope for the better future

[JPFSanders]

I'm fully aware that 32 bit is legacy

It is not, this is a misconception. 32Bit only processors are commercial legacy in the x86 world. 32Bit software and support on x86_64 is not legacy, it is 100% supported and removing compatibility from the OS is paramount to Canonical removing serial and parallel port support from the Kernel because not many computers come with these ports which happen to be an enterprise-grade standard.

[JPFSanders]

I work from time to time remaking those drivers. Mostly because they fail work any more due to kernel changes. For long term stability when ever you find something like that and it Linux you normally need planning to replace those as legacy.

The only exception I make on 32 bit drivers is 32 bit RTOS usage. Not Linux. Do note you don't have 32 bit kernels any more.

Maybe you mean 32 bit interface libraries. I have to replace some of those with new versions in 64 bit because you guess right they need to be updated so they were not security flawed by the intel cpu bugs and horrible the instructions you need to patch over bugs are only in the x86_64/AMD64 ISA.

So what you are telling me is that software and platforms requires maintenance, news at 9, and to avoid this maintenance you propose that everybody throw away their perfectly running software because you will show up to rewrite them in pure 64bits, all arround the world all at the same time, because 64bits is flawless and modern?

It is a trade off. You are trading away performance and security. 32bit x86 need to be deprecated due to the faults intel and others have made. Problem is you are clueless what you are trading away.

Once again I have doubts that you fully understand the issue at hand here.

The tradeoff is sotware outside of our control to develop, working or not working, you seem to think for some obscure reason that we want to run 32bit software when there is a 64bit software version available and we do because we're obstinate.

This is not the case (us being obstinate on 32bit), the issue is that we need to run 32bit-only software made by 3rd parties inside a 64bit OS for which there is no source code available, you seem to think that this is something that needs to go away for "reasons" that work only inside your head and not in the real world.

No you are like a person trying to say bitcoin will be a world currency.

We are seriously to the point that everywhere you find 32 bit x86 has to be considered legacy and plan to remove/deal with has to be made. Deal with has to include extra security because we know the stuff is busted.

I did not say such a thing even remotely, you made an analogy that doesn't even apply to the discussion (Discussion being: forcefully obsoleting/deprecating good working software in use today)

The fact that Games and Wine is the visible part of the problem is like the proverbial tip of the Iceberg.

You have absolutely no idea how many emergency systems are deployed everywhere that depends on those 32bit multiarch.

The fact that I'm having this conversation with anyone makes my head shake.

This is like saying oi, we can remove all telephone land lines and fibre connections because now we have 5G, replace "land lines and fibre connections" with 32Bit system libraries.

Why don't you go with the same argument "we need to obsolete 32Bit lib support" to any windows forum?

Try it please, we want to laugh at your expense.

[Ipkh]

There's a lot of strawman arguments in this here thrrad.
server/enterprise don't count as they don't install half the stuff desktop users do. It is not germane to the topic.
Ubuntu pulls from Debian, they could have just said what debian has we have and no changes will be made.
At least you could install steam as it would trigger the 32 bit libs to install at the same time.
Ideally the 64bit libs should handle the 32bit programs. But in the early days that just didn't work, the lib devs chose to go with the multiarch strategy or by inaction forced the linux distributions to do so.
Paying for it shouldn't even enter into the equation. Canonical like Microsoft, Redhat, IBM and Suse get their dough from enterprise and large companies. Having a desktop OS is important for enterprise as having standard platforms is important. How do you think those companies got so large?
Enterprise moves slow and would be most likely to have old custom apps and code that need 32bit support. I'll wager the change for the latest and future LTS branch came after feedback from paying enterprise customers. Enterprises pay big for support, just look at how much Microsoft charges for legacy support and how many businesses pay up to avoid moving forward.

[L_A_G]

I love how everyone who is against trying to kill of having to keep maintaining i386 binaries of practically everything acts like doing so is the only way to maintain support when containerization, VMs and a bunch of other methods for running i386 applications exist. There's one particularly dumb comment in this thread talking about C64 demos/games still being written as if that's an argument when modern systems obviously don't run C64 applications natively and the way the retro scene actually develops new software for systems made obsolete a long time ago involves very heavy use of emulators. Actual original hardware is generally only wheeled out towards the very end of development to ensure that everything works correctly.

If there is one complaint I have towards Canonical in all of this is that they went about it way too abruptly even if it's been clear for years that i386 support needed to be axed much the same way i286 was back in the day. Obviously they should have announced this change at least a whole version ahead to give developers enough time to adjust and alternative arrangements like containerizations to be implemented and debugged. This revised "Ok, we'll give you the essentials for one version, but after that you're on your own"-approach does admittedly achieve the same thing and probably should have been the target from the start with the "Need to get this done before the next LTS"-timetable they obviously set up for themselves.

The reality that this duplication of effort is just completely unnecessary this long after i386 hardware went out of production and simply a waste of limited developer resources that could be used much more productively elsewhere. i386 software that's still in development (of which there is way too much) just needs the developers to get off their backside and compile everything to x86_64 while software that isn't in development anymore, i.e legacy software, can be kept running trough methods like containerization. All in all we're talking about a slightly larger one-time effort that removes the need for a practically perpetual maintenance effort.

No matter what people are going to say, once the effort to make legacy software not reliant on i386 binaires is done (trough methods like containerization) and developers of still in-development get off their backsides there's really not going to be any loss of functionality. Just more developer resources that can be spent on new things and improvements rather than supporting an architecture that's been obsolete for a long time.

[kpedersen]

I have just realised there is another big issue here if 32-bit is dropped.

To some extent it would have been nice to say, if you want to run old games, get an old computer, install an old OS on it (and just keep it offline). This is fine and would actually be my personal solution and works well for retro gaming; Megadrive, DOS, SNES, eveything.

However Steam's invasive DRM and (one day) 64bit-only client will actually make that a no go. It will be impossible to connect to the DRM servers on a 32-bit client for activation and impossible to avoid connecting online for the download of the data (you will not want to do this on an old OS).

So it is crucial for Valve that Steam keeps working for 32-bit games; otherwise they might even be liable for legal action. Unless possibly they strip the DRM from the 32-bit games and allow them to be downloaded in a portable manner (such as a .iso / .zip) for all users that have them on their account.

I am very interested in seeing what Valve does when they do finally one day drop 32-bit Steam (10 years?). That said, they were happy to drop XP so I imagine they will do what they want.

[JPFSanders]

I have just realised there is another big issue here if 32-bit is dropped.

So it is crucial for Valve that Steam keeps working for 32-bit games; otherwise they might even be liable for legal action. Unless possibly they strip the DRM from the 32-bit games and allow them to be downloaded in a portable manner (such as a .iso / .zip) for all users that have them on their account.

Valve... valve... I've heard that name before... ah yeah a big company that invests a lot in the Linux ecosystem lately.

Is Valve Enterprise? Because I've heard on many posts here that Enterprises don't use 32-Bit apps.

[stargazer]

Depends on how old. There are 32 bit games running in 32 bit dosbox sold on steam to Linux uses. dosbox can be built 64 bit. There are a lot of other games in the steam store that are using emulation in 32 bit that is available in 64 bit.

This statement is quite plainly incorrect. It''s not just old dosbox games that are 32-bit. As one example I am familiar with, Stellaris, a game initially released by Paradox Interactive in 2016, was 32-bit until they released their most recent version a couple of months ago. It had substantial performance improvements in late-game by doing so and releasing in 32-bit was a detriment to many of their players. Why did they do so? Because they believed until recently that a substantial portion of their potential user base was on 32-bit Win7. So they made their game 32-bit because a substantial userbase was still using a 32-bit OS for almost a decade after Windows started switching to 64-bit. How many other gaming studios made similar decisions? You can't assume that 32-bit is antiquated when companies up to a couple of years ago were seeing enough userbase to drive their development decisions. And like it or not, Windows is still the driving force when it comes to consumer software, not Linux.