Valve looking to drop support for Ubuntu 19.10 and up due to Canonical's 32bit decision (updated)

Arch, we have the wiki :D

Quoting: keanI would even pay for it if everything works well.

I'd happily sign up to that, $10/month for a Valve developed Linux OS which provides the best possible gaming experience for Linux? Hell yes, give me that.

Eleven years of loving Ubuntu has also meant eleven years of growing exasperation with Canonical. This latest announcement feels like just another in a series of boldly taken stumbles made in the name of Canonical progress.

Unity desktop, Mir, that phone thing and its convergence, It feels like another case of Canonical imagining itself as a pack leader, shouting, "This way, Linux!" only to find out hardly anyone's following them. Mir, Mir, Mir, Mir, naaaah, Wayland. Unity eeeiiiiiiggghhhht---er, Gnome 3. They'll go off again, being all "64 bit is the way!!!" and everyone else will be like, "Mebs, but we'll hang onto 32 bit for now, yeah?"

Unless they drop Linux support entirely, I don't think Valve's next move will surprise me at all:

• I can see them sidling up to one of the more "core" distros: Suse, Debian, or Redhat/Fedora;


• I can see them doubling down with SteamOS, expanding it with apps, adding more and more desktop functionality, integrating something like a flatpak software center.


• I can see them leaning over to the Solus crew and saying, "So, what is you're working on? You say you've built it all yourselves? Hmmm, would you like some help with that?"

I'll be sad to leave Ubuntu for what will probably be the last time, but I'm excited to see where gaming on Linux goes next. Whereever it goes, I'm confident it's not going away.

Quoting: gradyvuckovicI'd happily sign up to that, $10/month for a Valve developed Linux OS which provides the best possible gaming desktop experience for Linux? Hell yes, give me that.

FTFY
I would pay for that.


Last edited by whatever on 22 June 2019 at 1:18 pm UTC

The problem is not 100% Canonical's decision. Consider also Valve's failure to build Steam for amd64, and the games industry (in general).

Quoting: GustyGhostThe problem is not 100% Canonical's decision. Consider also Valve's failure to build Steam for amd64, and the games industry (in general).

To be fair most new games (at least in the AAA category) have 64bit or are 64bit only, in some cases out of necessity.


Last edited by bolokanar on 22 June 2019 at 1:23 pm UTC

Valve is wrong about this.

It was high time for all software developers to stop supporting 32-bit. Valve should be able to fully switch to 64-bit faster.

This also applies to Wine. Stopping Wine64 support, and then crying and calling everyone bad - it`s brilliant.

The mess and stupidity of some developers amazes me every day. And Valve joined this as well. Valve still can not decide on the distribution. They were doing well with Debian / SteamOS, and then abandoned his support.

Quoting: gradyvuckovicValve didn't really have much of a choice. If there's a solution to this, Valve couldn't be expected to commit to figuring it out and fixing it just 3 months. Canonical pulled this out of no where with no warning and just expected everyone to deal with it.

They've been talking about this for about 2 years actually. Ubuntu 19.10 is just the testing ground for 20.04 LTS. It's possible that they'll not reverse this decision for 19.10, but might for 20.04, depending on how it goes with 19.10.

Quoting: mphuZValve is wrong about this.

It was high time for all software developers to stop supporting 32-bit. Valve should be able to fully switch to 64-bit faster.

This also applies to Wine. Stopping Wine64 support, and then crying and calling everyone bad - it`s brilliant.

This isn't about 32-bit vs 64-bit distros. It's about library support for the massive number of games that don't have 64-bit builds. And as far as Wine is concerned, the vast, vast majority of games installers are 32-bit only, so if you don't have architecture/library support for that, the game won't install.

Quoting: mphuZValve is wrong about this.

It was high time for all software developers to stop supporting 32-bit. Valve should be able to fully switch to 64-bit faster.

This also applies to Wine. Stopping Wine64 support, and then crying and calling everyone bad - it`s brilliant.

The mess and stupidity of some developers amazes me every day. And Valve joined this as well. Valve still can not decide on the distribution. They were doing well with Debian / SteamOS, and then abandoned his support.

I bet you're one of those guys crying badly when one of their games don't run anymore as it doesn't come with a 64-bit build.

Quoting: liamdaweInterestingly, Valve are now funding some work on KWin (part of KDE). - Added to the article.

I guess it would be quite easy to officially support the Flathub Steam flatpak, which already minimizes compatibility issues on lots of distros. Maybe Valve could even build a SteamOS flatpak themselves (I guess Snap is out of the contest by now ;-)), to support any distribution with recent enough kernel and drivers, without having to single out one specificially.
What you show us here speaks a different language however. To me this looks like they really seem to be concerned about the Linux desktop.
To fund KDE Plasma software, while using Gnome 3 for SteamOS at the same time is an interesting choice btw...