this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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That's a good sign, that Valve is moving at least the runtimes to 64bit only. Maybe that means the client is under similar scrutiny internally. Recently when Fedora was discussing dropping more 32bit libraries Steam came up as a big issue.
Yeah, 32bit is why I removed Steam from my Debian desktop daily driver again. I got conflicting 32bit and 64bit versions of some libraries that broke my system. I'm going to try a gaming focussed distro like Bazzite next time.
???
Debian separates out stuff with :[arch] suffixes, and is really flexible in the sense that it even lets you install stuff from completely different architectures for, for example, use with qemu userspace. An i386 package is going to only request i386 dependencies, unless it explicitly specifies an architecture, and vice versa. Arch Linux uses the "lib32-" prefix and I don't really remember how it worked on Fedora but I would imagine something similar. All "gaming focused distros" are merely just their mainstream counterparts with an extra repo for a few packages, it's not going to change fundamentals.
OpenSUSE is the same, the 32-bit stuff is completely separate from the 64-bit stuff, so you won't get conflicts between them.
I just run Steam as a flatpak. Works fine.
Not sure why the downvotes. Flatpak is a great thing.
Unless you muck around in bottles a lot of things break.
What does "muck around in bottles" mean?
Flatpacks have permission issues due to the way they are structurally designed. Applications like Flatseal and Bottles allow you to remove those limitations, but it's a lot easier to just install the client outside of Flatpack.
Bottles is an app that people who use hyperland also use, but I don't know what it does.
It's basically a GUI interface for wine
It doesn't work fine out of the box. I tried it on Opensuse MicroOS a year and a bit ago and had to search 3-5 pretty undocumented solutions to big problems before being able to play the same games that non-flatpak could.
Out of the box, proton didn't work at all.
Sometimes you have to allow access to some things outside of the Flatpak container. I use Flatseal for that.
I don't think flatseal can set the background permission, but I might not recall correctly:
Your better off using cachy if you want a gaming focused distro that doesn't break. Unless you use mostly flatpaks. Then bazzite is good
Give Steam Flatpak a try on Debian instead.
Didn't they already announce they're going to drop 32 bit?
Ah yes it looks like they did say that support for 32bit Windows is stopping soon:
Thanks I had missed this completely!
I assume this is the first step for them to move the client itself to being a 64bit executable later.
If you're talking about Fedora, no. One of the maintainers just proposed it and the media/commenters in the community went crazy without knowing the facts.
For windows at least, but I assume they'd do it across the board at once