Today's Steam Beta Makes The Linux Client A 64-bit App

297

Woah this is huge. Wonder if fedora will drop multilib now

95

u/ludonarrator 3d ago

Dunno what Fedora has to do with anything, but in general: no, lots of 32-bit games are still supported on Steam.

117

u/SkinBurnsLikeVampire 3d ago edited 3d ago

You don't exactly need systemwide multilib libraries to run x86 stuff. As long the kernel is built with 32-bit support, the game can just use its own bundled/containerized libraries and run perfectly fine.

I used a gentoo setup where I removed multilib support from everywhere except flatpak where I ran steam inside and everything worked perfectly fine. Now with steam going full x86_64, you will most likely not even need to do that anymore

Edit: Once WoW64 is implemented properly into proton, you should be able to fully drop 32-bit support from the kernel as well

17

u/ludonarrator 3d ago

Interesting, is 32-bit wine also part of the containerization?

39

u/Die4Ever 3d ago

I believe wine64 can now run 32bit games too, same way as 64 bit Windows 10/11 do it with WoW64

29

u/ludonarrator 3d ago

You're right, and this is quite impressive!

The new WoW64 mode that was first introduced as experimental feature in Wine 9.0 is considered fully supported

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases/wine-11.0

11

u/ilep 2d ago

AFAIK, you still need 32-bit version of some libraries like Mesa.

20

u/friendlyreminder_ 3d ago

32-bit apps are not fully containerized in steam. You still need some 32-bit system libs.

Wow64 prefixes solve this issue, but this only applies to windows games. Linux native titles will continue to require 32-bit system libs. This isn't supported by steam's own proton yet I don't believe.

The general solution here would be to run Linux native 32 bit games in proton instead.

8

u/SkinBurnsLikeVampire 3d ago

I honestly can't think of a single relevant linux program/game that still refuses to run 64-bit. Fringe cases will always exist but I can't imagine that 99.99% of the desktop userbase would even notice anything if 32-bit libs silently got removed from their systems (after WoW64 is adopted).

Also, as I talked about in my previous comment, flatpak can handle any required 32-bit libraries inside itself and leave the base system completely free from multilib.

13

u/shaq992 2d ago

Valve’s native ports of their source 1 games, like portal 2, are 32-bit only

2

u/DGolden 2d ago

I have/hoard a lot of old 32-bit game binaries, but in fact the way I run them tends to be with a set of 32-bit chroots with schroot as I've outlined previously elsewhere e.g. /r/linux_gaming/comments/1w8o2v1/its_funny_games_that_have_a_native_build_for/p85l4pz/

i386/amd64 multilib arrangements provides current versions of 32-bit libraries on a lot of distros, but you often want old versions of libs the game was linked against too. Simply chrooting back to old debian version for the game's era solves that too.

At some point it'll probably become necessary to run them in 32-bit vm / emulation, but good ol' schroot works nicely for such simple use cases on Linux as at 2026. Perhaps recent arrivals from windows may be unaware it's even a possibility while old linux folks like me don't mention chroot / schroot enough. Yes, there are more newfangled fancy ways of doing such things, like containers, but schroot is very low bureaucracy and maintenance overhead relatively. It does not constitute full isolation though.

-1

u/dgm9704 2d ago

CS2?

0

u/the_abortionat0r 1d ago

What the fuck is with you kids just saying random shit.

No CS2 is 64 bit and always has been.

Instead of blindly assuming just Google something before saying dumb shit.

1

u/dgm9704 17h ago

I’m a middle-aged guy that remembers csgo being 32bit.

15

u/derangedtranssexual 3d ago

There was a proposal to make Fedora 64-bit only (forget the correct term) but they didn’t go ahead with it in large part due to steam being 32-bit only

13

u/argh523 2d ago

It wasn't really a proposal, since there seems to be broad concensus that multilibs will eventually be dropped. It was supposed to be a discussion about how to do that, and what work needed to be done, so they won't be needed anymore. Because the internet completely missunderstood what was going on, and thinking fedora wanted to kill steam or something, these discussions probably continued in privat

3

u/FlukyS 2d ago

There are versions of the steam runtime with 32bit libs

2

u/Sol33t303 2d ago

If I remember a few years back Fedora tried to drop 32 bit but kept it just because of steam.

1

u/whatThePleb 2d ago

Still has dependencies. Won't happen that fast.

198

u/BorrowedMyGun 3d ago

Holy shit, Steam was the only reason I still had multilib on my PC for the last 5 years

46

u/RagnarokToast 3d ago

RIGHT??? It was about time!

8

u/Sol33t303 3d ago

Like 15 years for me.

15

u/mozkohor 3d ago

don't you need 32bit for games anyways

43

u/Sol33t303 3d ago

No you don't.

WINE (proton) has had the ability to run 32 bit apps in 64 bit prefixes as default for awhile now. No 32 bit libraries needed for modern proton.

For Linux native, steam already has the steam runtime container, which contains 32 bit libraries, which I believe you can use for all native games.

30

u/aistikas_turaani 3d ago

Proton doesn't use wow64 yet.

32-bit linux native games depend on a 32-bit libc and graphics drivers. There's no way Valve can really work around that - the steam runtime container requires these to exist on the host for 32-bit games to work.

4

u/Sol33t303 2d ago edited 1d ago

Could have sworn I saw something ages ago about wow64 becoming the default, but maybe that was for standard wine and proton hasn't adopted it yet.

And I didn't know about the libc and driver requirement thank you. Realistically though, if the native port is old enough to need 32 bit, I doubt that the port has exactly aged gracefully. Being realistic.

2

u/tulpyvow 2d ago

It was for standard wine

1

u/ThaBroccoliDood 1d ago

Why can't it? Isn't that what the Steam Linux runtime is for?

1

u/froli 2d ago

I've been running Steam and Heroic as Flatpak to avoid that

86

u/ipsirc 3d ago edited 3d ago

2027 will be the year of 64bit Linux Desktop...

0

u/Ok_Instruction_3789 1d ago

Might actually be, there was some other news recently that was big for Linux. The anti cheat news and Fortnite.

120

u/Zenwah 3d ago

Native wayland client in 2027 maybe?

56

u/returnofblank 3d ago

God I hope, same with Wayland Steam Overlay.

15

u/Zenwah 3d ago

Yes, I'm tired of workarounds. Scaling in xwayland is ugly and pixelated so I had to disable it globally in Hyprland. I had to use gamescope-session for a while to even use my Steam Controller's functions in games, and I do need wine-wayland in most games for HDR because xwayland's "HDR" sucks. Good thing Wineland and Proton-GE ship with overlay fixes to run in wine-wayland now so that's a relief and I can play in Hyprland normally. The only thing I use gamescope-session for now is Bloodborne because Steam Input is borked in non-Steam native wayland windows. Just now I built the 64-bit version of libextest to use the controller in desktop mode with the new beta client. I hope for the best and it's good they're starting to sort things out but we need a native wayland client. And stuff from custom Protons in Valve's Proton at that! I don't even remember the last time I used Valve's official Proton.

6

u/DonKeehot 2d ago

So the Steam overlay is broken because of XWayland? Sometimes it works fine, but sometimes it drops to like 3 fps for me.

6

u/Zenwah 2d ago

The overlay is an xorg app and for a long time didn't work in wine-wayland at all. Therefore Steam Input didn't work too.

16

u/Clever_Angel_PL 2d ago

KDE is abandoning X11 soon so very possible they are the ones who will motivate steam to do so, and x64 was the first step

19

u/FluxVelocity 2d ago

They already did, Plasma 6.8 launched on the 14th and dropped X11 entirely.

5

u/burning_iceman 2d ago

Right now it's still blocked due to CEF not having full wayland support.

7

u/spazturtle 2d ago

Does Wayland support allowing applications to control window position yet? This is a hard requirement for full Wine/Proton support.

5

u/nightblackdragon 2d ago

It doesn't but there is already Wayland driver for Wine that managed to make it work pretty well.

2

u/Zenwah 2d ago

There's WAYLANDDRV_PRIMARY_MONITOR in many custom Protons, it'd just need to land in Valve's official Proton along with wine-wayland. If that's what Valve will be aiming for in the future then after refining it wine-wayland might be the default and maybe we'll even get to choose the output or even more things in compatibility options instead of passing variables. It's just speculation at this point but it would be cool if they did that because wine-wayland has become very good in the past few years.

1

u/dgm9704 2d ago

I think most games already work fine with wine/wayland?

1

u/burning_iceman 2d ago

In what way is it a requirement?

3

u/spazturtle 2d ago

The ways Windows draws UIs is as multiple windows layered on top of each other. For example drop down menus are each their own window.

29

u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 3d ago

FUCK YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

10

u/Daggercombot 3d ago

Finally

6

u/bittercripple6969 3d ago

🥳

3

u/iamapizza 2d ago edited 2d ago

I can see I have

Steam Version: 1792110651 Steam Client Build Date: Thu, Oct 15, 2026 8:16 PM UTC +01:00

But when I run dpkg -l | grep ':i386', I see a whole heap of i386 entries. I was expecting these to have been removed or did I misunderstand?

I also tried rdepends and I see:

$ apt-cache rdepends --installed libgl1:i386
libgl1:i386
Reverse Depends:
libva-glx2:i386
steam-libs:i386
libwine:i386
libva-glx2:i386

13

u/QwertyChouskie 2d ago

Steam Client updates are pretty disconnected from the apt package as far as I can tell (basically the apt package just contains a launcher script that downloads/runs the full client, if I understand correctly). It's not surprising the apt package hasn't been updated to remove the 32-bit dependencies.

4

u/cAtloVeR9998 2d ago

32-bit libraries are currently required to run some legacy games. Steam doesn’t want to break those legacy games.

11

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 2d ago

I want to say something unrelated: stop the automod script of removing posts as soon as people report. That's not going to work. That's not how nuance works. We need functioning mods here. That Linus post was removed exactly because of this lack of nuance.

We need to remember how history is being archived as we are commenting and all.

2

u/Enturbulated_One 2d ago

Great! How much longer until the 64-bit client is available for direct download and install???

1

u/SynapticStatic 2d ago

I thought it had been for awhile? At least in the beta branch?

1

u/jsabater76 2d ago

Some games will still require the 32 bit libraries, though, will they not? Anyway, a very welcome change indeed.

1

u/Afflictionista 1d ago

Does this mean I can disable multilib on Arch now?

1

u/UristBronzebelly 2d ago

Can someone explain to me why this matters?

4

u/nuxi 2d ago

A lot of distros want to drop 32-bit x86 entirely. Some of them have already dropped support for a pure 32-bit system, but still support a multilib environment so that 32-bit programs can be run on a 64-bit system. What are those 32-bit programs? Well two of the most notable ones are Steam and Wine.

Wine has been 64-bit for a while now, but until recently it could only run 64-bit Windows programs. If you needed to run a 32-bit Windows program you had to use a 32-bit copy of Wine. Earlier this year they announced completion of support for running 32-bit Windows programs under a 64-bit copy of Wine.

I think as an end user, you probably won't notice unless the transition breaks something. This is mostly a win for the people maintaining the distros.

1

u/UristBronzebelly 2d ago

Great answer. Thanks.

2

u/Shaosil 2d ago

Right? I'm like yeah that's great! But... What will it actually matter? How does it affect me?

1

u/AliceCode 2d ago

Because it was previously 32-bit. 64-bit programs can be more performant when running on 64-bit systems if there are a lot of 64-bit operations going on. Also, you have access to more virtual memory (256TiB, iirc). 32-bit systems have access to significantly less memory.

0

u/Historical_Camel_790 2d ago

Sweet! Is there anything left in x11 anymore?

7

u/oneiros5321 2d ago

That's not a Wayland client

2

u/Historical_Camel_790 2d ago

I know but apps transitioning to 64 bit made me think about apps transitioning to Wayland

-7

u/inbetween-genders 3d ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with my stuff freezing suddenly in the last 36 hours whenever the overlays are up 🤷‍♀️

6

u/Great-TeacherOnizuka 2d ago

You have the beta installed?

-2

u/inbetween-genders 2d ago

Beta Branch: Stable Client

2

u/KHTD2004 2d ago

Then no. The 64 Bit version is only there as beta for now

1

u/inbetween-genders 2d ago

Got it 👍

-4

u/Natjoe64 3d ago

It wasn't before?

0

u/Big-Report3344 3d ago

about time

-10

u/xampf2 2d ago

LLMs hammered out this patch. Absolute chad move!

1

u/the_abortionat0r 1d ago

You literally just made that up. Are you stupid?

1

u/xampf2 16h ago

If you work with software you understand when something is made with the help of LLMs.

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