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If you're an NVIDIA user still on 32bit, you might want to think about finally updating as this month NVIDIA will be moving to only providing critical security updates for 32bit systems.

Not exactly surprising, as everything is gradually going 64bit. Our own user survey suggests a minuscule amount of people still on 32bit, with only 3 out of 2493 people telling us they're still lingering on 32bit.

In regards to security updates for their drivers, you have until January 2019.

See the official note from NVIDIA here.

On top of that, NVIDIA is also dropping their support for the Fermi series (GeForce 400/500) this month, with security updates also going on until January 2019. More on that here. This means, eventually, those on Fermi cards will be depending on the Nouveau open source drivers.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Purple Library Guy Apr 11, 2018
Quoting: TheSHEEEP
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.

This is obviously not the case. First, I am a counterexample, as I had mentioned to MIRV pages above. Therefore you are empirically wrong. Second, a game on sale on Steam costs $10-20 (Cdn) or less per game. A new game computer to replace my old one costs $1500-2000 (Cdn). It is very easy to be in a situation in which one can afford the occasional $10 but not $1000+; what on earth is odd about this concept? Note that a thousand dollars is a hundred times as big as ten dollars. Two thousand dollars is two hundred times as big as ten dollars. Often, people who can afford x cannot afford 200x. Now you know; if you have been having problems with budgeting, perhaps this news may help you in the future.
Apologies for the sarcasm, but I think people leading with big posters of "Won't somebody please think of the children" (without a question mark, for some reason) while talking obvious nonsense are kind of asking for a bit, eh?
First of all, who the hell needs to spend ~1000€ to upgrade their years old 32bit piece to support 64bit?!
So if you are paying so little attention that I'm explicitly saying "$ Cdn" and then you come back at me with Euros, it's clear you have no room in your head for both making sense and your specially armoured high horse. No, in Canada three hundred bucks is not remotely realistic. Yes, if you're a computer nerd you have expertise which allows you to get computers cheap. Congratulations, I am not worthy etc etc., but other people have other expertise and interests and the cost in time to learn how to do it the cheap way is greater than the cost of buying retail. If that makes no sense to you, explain to me how you do your own car repairs, electrician work and plumbing among other things.

Yes, when you're a penniless student you can fairly easily save up for frivolous things. That is because you're a kid with no responsibilities. I have a family, kids getting married I have to help out, grandkids. In short, I do have responsibilities and it would be irresponsible of me at this time to waste my money on a new computer. At some point in the future I expect I will be able to buy a new computer; that day is not today and it would not suddenly become today if I had the benefit of your oh-so-magical expertise. Maybe when you grow up you'll understand.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 11 April 2018 at 9:07 am UTC
thelimeydragon Apr 11, 2018
Quoting: Purple Library Guy...

Out of curiosity what is your CPU?

less /proc/cpuinfo


Last edited by thelimeydragon on 11 April 2018 at 9:22 am UTC
cRaZy-bisCuiT Apr 11, 2018
Fermi should still be supported in the legacy branch which should be fine. Like this it's still possible to use it on modern kernels. Or are they going to totally drop it? In that case I might stay with the latest working OS on my "lan PC".


It's about time they kick x86 - from a Software developers perspective it's a burden to be backwards compatible for ages and carrying along too much overhead. Almost every computer since 2004 or even before that can handle x64. So what's the deal? Steam even started to be well-known when x64 was a thing anyway.


Whatsoever, someone who doesn't have appropriate hardware but can't afford it should let himself gift something.


I gave a lot of Core i3 1st generation Hardware to people including 8 GB RAM etc. - if you add a cheap graphics card it can handle modern OSes and decent games.
legluondunet Apr 11, 2018
Not only games, PCSX2, the famous PS2 emulator is 32 bits only.


Last edited by legluondunet on 11 April 2018 at 9:38 pm UTC
Shmerl Apr 12, 2018
Does this mean they'll stop releasing 32-bit drivers altogether? So let's say Nvidia blob users won't be able to run 32-bit games anymore (including in Wine)? That's quite a huge amount of games really.


Last edited by Shmerl on 12 April 2018 at 4:43 am UTC
stretch611 Apr 12, 2018
For the record... I just bought Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on steam. It was released about 2 weeks ago. (A remake of a 15 year old game.)

Despite being 2 weeks old... it requires 32 bit libraries.
QuoteNWN:EE 1.74 should run on any recent Linux distribution, but will likely require some 32bit packages installed. These instructions are on a best-effort basis. You will likely have to adapt them to the Linux distribution of your choice.

The following components need to be available on your system:

* OpenAL
* GL (likely provided by your 3rd-party GPU driver, or by the X11 driver-package)

Again, please note that all of these need to be available in their 32bit variant. For 64bit Linux installs, there’s usually a way to install 32bit packages (either by using multiarch support or by installing separately-named packages).

For Ubuntu (16.04 64bit), to satisfy all install requirements, do this:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install lib32stdc++6
$ sudo apt install libopenal1:i386

Respectively, for 32 bit installs, you can omit the add-architecture step and the :i386 postfixes.

When in doubt, use ldd to find out which libraries you are missing:

$ ldd nwmain-linux
linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf77d8000)
libGL.so.1 => not found
libopenal.so.1 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libopenal.so.1 (0xf14bf000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf14ba000)
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf1343000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0xf12ee000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf12d0000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf12b3000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf10fd000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0xf10f4000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf77d9000)

For other distributions, please refer to their user manual or package manager.

So even if you are using 64 bit distro... you will still need 32 bit libraries in order to play games that came out last month.

That being said... If the 64 bit drivers install and allow 32 bit access through an interface, we should be ok with future updating.
cRaZy-bisCuiT Apr 12, 2018
What the heck, guys? Of course you can still run x86 applications, including Steam, games and emulators.


The only thing you can't do is installing the driver on a x86 distribution. They get abandoned anyway, no one needs them anymore so there's no reason to over react here.
Ehvis Apr 12, 2018
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Quoting: ShmerlDoes this mean they'll stop releasing 32-bit drivers altogether? So let's say Nvidia blob users won't be able to run 32-bit games anymore (including in Wine)? That's quite a huge amount of games really.

No. It was already said somewhere that 32 bit libraries needed to run 32 bit software on 64 bit distribution would be unaffected.
solar_dome Apr 14, 2018
Just to add a bit of info.
According to winehq, there are many 64-bit applications that still include 32-bit components.

I forget the exact quote, but I even got an email reply from a Grip dev, stating that their 64-bit game uses 32-bit components.


Last edited by solar_dome on 14 April 2018 at 1:35 am UTC
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