Valve to continue Steam gaming on Ubuntu Linux

[steven36]

But, the gaming company isn't happy with Canonical and will try to work closer with other Linux distributors.

 

 

When Canonical announced that, beginning with October's Ubuntu 19.10 release, 32-bit -computer support would be dropped, it didn't expect there would be much blowback. It was wrong. Developers and users, especially of Steam games, threw fits. So, Canonical, makers of Ubuntu Linux, reversed course and asserted it wouldn't drop 32-bit software support in Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS after all. 

 

So, everything's back to normal, yes? No.

 

True, Valve will continue to support Ubuntu. But Ubuntu will no longer be called out as "as the best-supported path for desktop users." Instead, Valve is re-thinking how it wants to approach distribution support going forward. There are several distributions on the market today that offer a great gaming desktop experience such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Fedora, and many others. 

 

That said, it should be noted that Arch Linux and Manjaro have already dropped 32-bit support, and Pop! Is based on Ubuntu. Red Hat's Fedora just announced it's dropping the 32-bit Linux kernel, but it will keep the 32-bit libraries. Thus, of the named distributions, only Fedora looks promising for 32-bit Steam. 

 

The gaming company also explained why it's determined to stick with archaic 32-bit software. First, while Steam already bundles much of the 32-bit gaming software dependencies needed, "it currently relies on some key components being available on the host system: A 32-bit glibc, ELF loader, Mesa, and NVIDIA graphics driver libraries, to name a few."

 

Valve wasn't ready to update Steam and games for an Ubuntu 19.10 without 32-bit support. It could have done it, but "requiring such a fundamental change in Steam's runtime environment in that time frame would have been very risky for [Ubuntu] users, and would likely not have resulted in a seamless experience."

 

In addition, there are many "older third-party games and desktop software that lives outside of Steam, and therefore does not use the Steam runtime environment. This new scheme would have broken such 32-bit non-Steam games and tools." 

 

Source

[steven36]

Valve To Work With More Distros To Improve Linux Gaming

 

 

As a part of the ongoing Ubuntu-Steam spectacle, Valve has published a new update on their website. The Steam-maker company has reaffirmed its plans to continue to support Linux gamers and work with leading Linux distributions that are known to be popular among gamers.

 

Starting with Ubuntu, Valve has confirmed that it will continue to support Steam officially on Ubuntu. “It seems likely that we will be able to continue to officially support Steam on Ubuntu,” Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais wrote in the update. This statement comes after Ubuntu decided to ditch its plans to retire the 32-bit packages starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 release.

 

Explaining its earlier stance, Steam writes that the support for 32-bit libraries is also necessary for thousands of Steam games that only run on 32-bit architecture. While there are workarounds to ensure running such games in an additional compatibility layer, Valve doesn’t consider this viable for a regular user.

 

 

Valve wishes to work closely with other distros

As many Linux enthusiasts have already pointed out in different forums, there are many distros other than Ubuntu that perform better when it comes to gaming. Our own list of distros for gaming lists System 76’s Pop! _OS, Manjaro, and Solus as some of the better alternatives.

 

The feedback from the users has also prompted Valve to reconsider its approach of working with distro vendors. The blog post invites distro maintainers to get in touch with Steam Project and work closely with them to ensure better gaming performance. Certain developers of different distros, including openSUSE and Pop!_OS, have already expressed their desire to work with Valve:

openSUSE would probably be a good choice, we have solid 32-bit multilib support, and our licensing approach would allow Steam to be officially in our non-oss repo if Valve would like that

— Richard Brown (@sysrich) June 22, 2019

Regarding Ubuntu dropping 32bit packages: First, Pop!_OS will support Steam and Wine32 for the foreseeable future. If the necessary packages are not built for Ubuntu, we'll build them in a Pop!_OS repo. We've identified 175 packages coming from 113 source packages. 1/2

— Carl Richell (@carlrichell) June 24, 2019

At the moment, Valve doesn’t have a list of specific Linux distributions that it’s going to be working with but we should expect some update on this in near future.

 

Source