• zurohki@aussie.zone
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      11 hours ago

      The advantage to Steam going 64-bit is that most people can now remove all their 32-bit libraries.

      Previously you needed 32-bit libraries for most of the actual games you ran through Steam, so it didn’t really matter if Steam used them too.

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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      15 hours ago

      Wine couldn’t run 32 bit games without 32 bit libraries. They added experimental support for WoW64 a few years ago and now it’s considered stable. There was probably just no rush to make Steam 64 bit if it still needed 32 bit libraries for older games.

      • bookmeat@fedinsfw.app
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        15 hours ago

        Distros have been pushing really hard for this since Ubuntu in 2019, then fedora in 2025 because it’s very hard to keep maintaining multilib and i686 for basically only wine and steam. So with this change we can finally get rid of that baggage.

        • Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org
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          59 minutes ago

          Yeah, and what happens with users of older hardware (because they can’t or don’t want to pay for newer software, or because they maintain it as a secondary hardware)? Multilib/32 bit is still important today because of inclusivity and democratisation.

            • Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org
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              3 minutes ago

              Yeah, and most of these people can’t because they don’t have sufficient resources. Most people who only owns a legacy piece of hardware does that not out of will, but because they can’t pay anything better. Now, these people works 8 to 10 hours a day and the time they spend moving from home to work and from work to home is, let’s put an intermediate value, 2 to 3 hours. That’s 10 to 13 hours out of work and travel. Now take into account they have to do things as cook, clean their house, take care of their children if they have, etc., and after all of that, they only have a few hours of rest, and they’re so fucking burned and broken by their routine that they won’t have the time or energy to do so. And it’s not better when you’re unemployed, it’s worst.

              Maintaining software, self-hosting and all that, is not for poors, is exclusionary towards them as is elitist and expensive. Not only of money, but of energy, time and computational resources… That with legacy hardware and such a routine nobody can ever have. Don’t defend that “just make it yourself bro” because that makes you a fucking asshole. Period.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      Back when the very first Linux port of Steam was released, there were a couple of Atom CPUs still 32 bit and Valve is relatively slow to change the fundamentals of the Steam client.

      IMO one of be bigger mistakes Valve made and also the reason why I switched to the Steam Flatpak early.

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      They now have AI agents to hold their hand while going through everything, perhaps.