For those that think the response is overblown, from the thread:
These images are intended to be a drop-in replacement for Steam Deck OS for handheld console-like gaming PCs like the Steam Deck (Lenovo Legion Go, ASUS ROG Ally, MSI Claw, and other hardware in the same space).
These are also to be used to create gaming theater PCs, for streamlined use on a living room television.
The issue with “just using Flatpak or a container” is that the gamescope compositor simply does not work in those situations, when paired with Steam’s Gaming Mode, as it has the same concerns as a desktop environment. There would simply be no way to serve Gaming Mode as an environment.
As such, moving to this would essentially force Bazzite, as a project, to abandon its primary reason for existing - alienating 2/3s of their userbase. The remaining 1/3s would be served a lesser experience for a variety of more paper cut reasons, and VR is already a complex topic which would get even worse.
It’s a big deal because disallowing the native steam build would make it nearly impossible to run bazzite in a SteamOS-like experience (which accounts for 2/3s of bazzite’s users)
Throwing a tantrum isn’t how to get what you want. This is a common behavior in the OSS world from wannabe BDFLs. Linus Torvalds or Guido van Rossum earned that title through merit, not through the simple luck of your side project going viral.
Bazzite is just Fedora Atomic with some extra preinstalled software. If it dies, it’ll hurt the community of Linux gamers who picked it for whatever reason, but it won’t make Fedora maintain 32 bit packages forever.
When Redhat went Fedora, I learned Debian and Ubuntu. When they decided to flush CentOS, I GTFO even professionally and stayed out of their ancestral distros.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with change and updating, but they are very focused on making things better/easier for themselves without worries about who they’re supposed to be supporting.
Hear me out… But should we be asking why there are so many things, steam included, that are still on 32b libraries?
I mean the answer is pretty easy: video games generally have a long shelf life and no maintenance at some point after they’re released.
I think I can hear Bringus sobbing somewhere
the return of HoloISO never booting up
See. This is why I game only on Windows. There’s never any controversy or issues there. /s
I’ll see myself out now.
Ugghhh, I just got it set up with arr stack on my media computer. Can someone more familiar with the trajectory of the project tell me the odds of this actually happening? Or is it more of a PR move to get people’s attention on the Fedora project?
Well, no. If it actually happens, Bazzite can’t exist. Valve only releases 32bit of Steam for the official client. If support for 32bit is removed from Fedora, then gamers won’t be able to use Steam on Fedora or its downstream distros.
Wouldn’t the Steam Flatpak still work?
Just migrate to cachy! It’s everything bazzite is but better!
Instead of shutting down why not choose another distro base
The only notable thing about Bazzite is that it’s built on top of Fedora Atomic, making it immutable like SteamOS.
Without that, it’s just a regular old distro with some opinions about which software should be preinstalled.
That would require redoing everything. It would be a massive project, and honestly since there’s already other gaming oriented distros out there, what would be the point? It’s not like Garuda or PopOS is shit.
Probably a lot of time and work to do so, they’ve spent a lot of time learning what tweaks Fedora needs.
Why not ride streams coat-tails and switch to arch?
Or Debian. It still supports MIPS64 officially and 68K unofficially. x86 isn’t going anywhere for a long time.
Makes sense
After Bazzite I went to Garuda, is also gaming focused and has a handy helper app that helps you install common software, run updates, and more.
If you need a new distro it’s worth a look.
I went to Garuda
THERE’S DOZENS OF US, DOZENS!!
Hell yeah brother, make it 11 of us!
💪💪💪💪
I go with CachyOs Ik ik the compiler optimizations only give a minor difference and maybe major in latency but am just comfy with it.
I just like how minimal is the distroWhy not just install the CachyOS kernel onto Fedora (like me)? I then deleted the stock kernle and now make sure to use --exclude=kernel* when updating. Works like a charm.
Ik
My go-to too.
Cachyos has some great default setup choices too. Limine with btrfs + snapper, all preconfigured… spot on!
Ohh yeah true I forgot they offer alterntive bootloaders that arent grub
Isn’t Garuda also based on Fedora?
Edit: I was thinking of Nobara.
Honestly go for EnOS. Garuda is neat and has a good default setup, but they’ve gone a little far with their modifications imo
Oh? I’m still a Linux noob, educate me.
There is a lite version, but sure whatever you prefer.
Pop! OS with big screen mode on second display/workspace is the best of both worlds.
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.
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.
WINE’s WoW64, does not work for all games.
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
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.
only problem could be other packages or the kernel becoming incompatible
Yea dependency management without updates is like 80% of the work that goes into package maintenance
Dammit - found Bazzite one week ago and love it - now its embroiled in a controversy.
Dw, this will pass - there is too much passion in the project, and too many with stakes in it too. If it is installed on so many people’s systems, we will have many people eager to see this continue also.
If it helps at all some of the comments in the linked discussion mentions it’s at minimum a year out
Same here. Nobara was too glitchy so I switched to Bazzite and love it so far. Sigh.
Did he elaborate on why? Is it really that integral to have 32bit tools?
Yes, and from what I understood:
- Steam is still 32bit. Two-thirds of Bazzite’s user base use the OS on handhelds requiring Steam’s gaming mode front-end. Installing Steam as a flatpak removes the ability to boot into gaming mode, and so alienating two-thirds of Bazzite’s user base.
- It will kill support for older games that are still 32bit. Wine’s WoW64 isn’t ready yet, and even so, building custom Proton for 32bit support (e.g. Including all the 32bit libraries inside of Proton itself) on top of the Proton provided by Valve is going to be very messy.
- OBS requires 32bit packages to capture video data from 32bit games. If 32bit is no longer supported, this’ll kill streamers playing older games (OBS is probably the most widely used software by streamers and game recorders).
- It would kill VR on Bazzite, as VR still makes use of 32bit features (I’m not sure why or which ones, but that’s what’s said).
Oh wow, if steam is still 32 bit, forget the offshoots, fedora itself won’t be worth using. I’m on fedora but if I can’t run steam, then I’m finding a new distro.
On the flip side, what’s the reason they want to drop 32-bit support, given steam depends on it, which they should understand means it’s integral to the size of their current userbase?
People just ditching Fedora for another distro is exactly what is being warned about on the linked forum thread, should the Fedora team decide to go through with it.
As for the why; the Fedora team says that 32bit libraries are annoying to maintain and that they can cut it out to save on time and resources. They consider 32bit old and no longer relevant.
However, others have said that if 32bit is still being used (also for none-game-related projects) then it’s still relevant and should still be maintained. Also that Fedora should develop according to what the user base wants, and not pull a Microsoft/Apple and force want they want on the user base.
Afaik Steam still heavily relies on 32-Bit. And bazzite’s only purpose is Steam.
The comments in the thread don’t mention Steam itself, but it’s that running all the 32 bit games will become a problem. Steam’s flatpak packages the 32 bit packages so that can get around this change, but the flatpak is not official and does not support all features. Steam themselves only provide the RPM for Fedora.
What features are missing on flatpak version? I am playing games that way without any issues…
I’m no expert, and I’m running Bazzite (and previously Nobara), both of which have the RPM installed by default so I don’t think I’ve ever used the Steam Flatpak. But things mentioned in the thread are VR and Gamescope.
I do wonder if any issues are related to permission restrictions that could be resolved editing permissions with Flatseal, but I don’t know enough about the issues.
steam package from rpmfusion is not official
Ah you’re right. It seems Steam only provides a *.deb as far as I can tell.
Ah yeah. Would be unfortunate. Bazzite was the least amount of setup i’ve ever had to do with linux and is the only repo I could recommend to someone non-technical
That makes me sad. Bazzite just refused to install on my new laptop (as did several others, amusingly) so it was back to manjaro for me.
There are others like it and some better for those who are both non-technical and non-gamers. What you’re looking for is “immutable distro” https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/ which is a distro of Linux that is very user friendly, much like Windows, in not allowing major changes to the OS. SteamOS is this as well.
It makes setup and updates much easier to manage and easier for users to use because it just works most of the time.
I tried fedora kinoite and the experience is much worse than bazzite. The nvidia drivers ware a pain to install on kinote but bazzite just provides an image with them already configured.
If bazzites only purpose is steam then it would’ve probably “died” anyway when Holo Desktop releases
Glad I didnt install bazzite.
what did you go with?
I’ve heard CachyOS is good but I’m not the one to ask.
CachyOS is great, much better than Bazzite or Nobara IMO. Been daily driving it on my gaming rig with an NVIDIA GPU for ~9mo. Great performamce, no complaints.
PikaOS is Debian based, and they’ve built the deps they need for Steam in 32-bit, so it’s not the end of the world AFAIK. GloriousEggroll seems to be part of it too, so if any refugees are looking for something not Fedora-based there you go. Although his efforts for now seem focused more on Nobara (which is Fedora-based) maybe this will cause some shake-ups there too. I can see Pika is already picking up speed from this though, the Discord is super active.
Even if Fedora doesn’t ever drop support I think even considering the possibility is shaking people’s confidence in using it as a base going forward, sort of like how Unity’s quickly-walked-back disasters drove people irrevocably towards Godot and other engines. Arch and Arch-based distros are probably starting to look much more appealing too.
