its not possible. valve is annoying

Not possible right now. Join the recent push to abandon 32-bit, if you must.

The Steam Client is 32 bits. ( More or less, I'm aware that some components are 64 bit)

The answer to your question is NO.

I'm not aware of anyway to filter them. I'm not seeing any reference to 32bit or 64bit in the metadata. You could always look at the prefix and see if that game has 32bit or 64bit ELF binaries.

Since you have listed Arch as an OS, I'm going to go ahead and give you the Arch treatment.

Read the wiki.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam

Originally posted by sweetiebot:

its not possible. valve is annoying

Thank you for your reply.

Originally posted by DaMu:

Not possible right now. Join the recent push to abandon 32-bit, if you must.

Thank you for your reply, can l have link to join push?

Originally posted by AngryBeard:

The Steam Client is 32 bits. ( More or less, I'm aware that some components are 64 bit)

The answer to your question is NO.

I'm not aware of anyway to filter them. I'm not seeing any reference to 32bit or 64bit in the metadata. You could always look at the prefix and see if that game has 32bit or 64bit ELF binaries.

Since you have listed Arch as an OS, I'm going to go ahead and give you the Arch treatment.

Read the wiki.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam

Thank you for the explanation and link.

Originally posted by DaMu:

Not possible right now. Join the recent push to abandon 32-bit, if you must.

I would rather Linux not take a page from Apple by mindlessly axing 32bit support. That's just me though.

Originally posted by Mr. Doggy:

Originally posted by DaMu:

Not possible right now. Join the recent push to abandon 32-bit, if you must.

I would rather Linux not take a page from Apple by mindlessly axing 32bit support. That's just me though.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Even if distributions are wanting to get rid of them, I think we will still be able to find them. SteamOS is a partnership between Valve and Arch these days, so you know Arch isn't getting rid of them anytime soon.

There was a Fedora proposal to remove 32bit libraries in Fedora 44, but that has since been walked back, I think mainly due to push back from the gaming community.

Originally posted by AngryBeard:

Originally posted by Mr. Doggy:

I would rather Linux not take a page from Apple by mindlessly axing 32bit support. That's just me though.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Even if distributions are wanting to get rid of them, I think we will still be able to find them. SteamOS is a partnership between Valve and Arch these days, so you know Arch isn't getting rid of them anytime soon.

There was a Fedora proposal to remove 32bit libraries in Fedora 44, but that has since been walked back, I think mainly due to push back from the gaming community.

Fedora being Fedora... Hahahaha

Last time they said they were going to ditch X11/Xorg support... They tried it, and half of the graphical applications didn't work 100%...

There is no need to ditch i386 (32bits) architecture, at least, not while the Linux kernel supports it...

Of course Valve could upgrade steam to full 64bits, but last time I heard about it, seems like they have some validation layers that do need to be 32 bits... Gotta wait n see...

Folks assume that abandoning lib32 support will result in a pure 64 bit Steam client. More likely it would result in NO Steam client for your (not actually "supported"*) distribution if they drop 32 bit userspace. It's not just a matter of compiling one for x86_64, it's how the Steam client interacts with runtimes to run games etc. So they'll procrastinate for as long as they can.

* The only distribution that Steam Linux officially supports on the PC is Ubuntu. Obviously they intend for it to work on any reasonable distro with lib32 and glibc 2.31+ but they can't be responsible for what every distributor does.

Originally posted by Grogan:

Folks assume that abandoning lib32 support will result in a pure 64 bit Steam client. More likely it would result in NO Steam client for your (not actually "supported"*) distribution if they drop 32 bit userspace. It's not just a matter of compiling one for x86_64, it's how the Steam client interacts with runtimes to run games etc. So they'll procrastinate for as long as they can.

* The only distribution that Steam Linux officially supports on the PC is Ubuntu. Obviously they intend for it to work on any reasonable distro with lib32 and glibc 2.31+ but they can't be responsible for what every distributor does.

Eh, for discussion sake, I would actually be more interested in an ARM version before they tried to make a 64bit client. Which as you implied, would significantly impact the game catalog. Valve could potentially start looking into flatpack/appimage/etc if the libraries get dropped as well.

The Flatpak version of Steam runs just fine for me without 32-bit libraries installed on my system, but that's "cheating" a bit since Flatpak itself provides 32-bit libraries/runtimes.

Originally posted by AngryBeard:

Eh, for discussion sake, I would actually be more interested in an ARM version...

That would be interesting. I recently put together a Raspberry Pi 5 kit for hooking up to a TV to watch shows and movies. It's got a quad core A76, 16 Gb of RAM and is probably capable of some light gaming with that broadcom v3d graphics adapter. It can do full screen 1920x1080 video, at least. I've got EndeavourOS on there, since Arch themselves don't support that CPU with bootloader and kernel.

I would imagine it would be tricky to get Steam to work on aarch64 at this time, you'd probably have to run it through an emulator (box86 + box64?). Or maybe it's possible to run the Windows client in Wine 10+ now since it now has an ABI for executing x86/x86_64 on ARM.

Hello. I understand that people always strive to make their lives easier, but this is not always a good thing.

This concerns formats like AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, and similar — yes, they indeed simplify the installation and distribution of software. However, they also make the system heavier and less efficient compared to native packages of the distribution. Additionally, using such technologies can negatively impact system security.

When I asked my question, I knew that installing multi-architecture libraries was necessary for running certain applications. For example:

- In Debian, this is done with the command:
dpkg --add-architecture i386

- In Arch Linux, by editing the /etc/pacman.conf file and adding the section:
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

I believe that Valve has many resources to consider releasing an exclusively 64-bit version of the client for enthusiasts, at least in beta. Eventually, this will be necessary — it will be easier to prepare for the day when 32-bit systems can be phased out.

I am not an experienced programmer and do not fully understand all the complexities involved in transitioning to a 64-bit architecture. However, I believe that supporting both architectures — 32-bit and 64-bit — is very time-consuming and resource-intensive. Therefore, it would make sense to switch entirely to a 64-bit version of the client in the future.

Originally posted by Grogan:

Folks assume that abandoning lib32 support will result in a pure 64 bit Steam client. More likely it would result in NO Steam client for your (not actually "supported"*) distribution if they drop 32 bit userspace. It's not just a matter of compiling one for x86_64, it's how the Steam client interacts with runtimes to run games etc. So they'll procrastinate for as long as they can.

* The only distribution that Steam Linux officially supports on the PC is Ubuntu. Obviously they intend for it to work on any reasonable distro with lib32 and glibc 2.31+ but they can't be responsible for what every distributor does.

The only intelligent comment in this thread.