
Valve Will Not Be Officially Supporting Ubuntu 19.10 - MikusR
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Dropping-Official-Ubuntu
======
overgard
Smart move by Valve IMO. Canonical is offloading a lot of work onto them if
they continue down this road, and Valve easily has enough sway to convince
people to use a new distro.

I think it'd be a huge mistake for Canonical not to reverse their direction on
this. The original decision was defensible when it wasn't obvious how many
problems dropping 32 bit support would create, but obviously it's a big issue
to a lot of their customers.

~~~
iamnotacrook
Why would Canonical care? They don't get any money from desktop users.
Canonical get to scrap 32 bit on their desktop and server offerings. Why would
they want to rethink wasting that money just to prolong the time when they
abandon it? Where's Steam going to go? How can they be certain that whatever
distro they switch to won't eventually abandon 32 bit? (I mean, I guarantee
they will.). Will they then go back to Ubuntu? Or a third distro, then a
fourth.... Why don't they just fix their problem now and get it over with?

~~~
pmarin
> Why would Canonical care?

It become popular in the cloud because it was popular in the desktop.

~~~
jcastro
That's not true, as much as people want to believe that.

Ubuntu and Canonical jumped on AWS quickly and started to generate supported
images that people liked that gave them fresh stuff that they couldn't really
get with Amazon Linux and RHEL was still stuck in the 90's enterprise pricing
model, so Ubuntu was a natural fit there.

Sadly, most Ubuntu users are on mac clients, and Canonical isn't going to care
about 1 laptop when they need to spend the money to support the millions of
instances that one laptop is spawning on AWS, Azure, GCP.

The few "linux desktop" people who are left will still have the same desktop,
as long as they get their vscode, docker, cloud tools, and a terminal/ssh they
won't care much.

~~~
michaelmrose
"most Ubuntu users are on mac clients," What?

"The few "linux desktop" people who are left"

Citation needed.

~~~
pjmlp
The 1% on Steam hardware survey.

~~~
overgard
1% of 90 million monthly users is almost a million users.

Supporting something with 900,000 users seems, at the very least, somewhat
compelling. Especially since they were already doing it. It's not like they
have to actively recruit these people, but what they're definitely doing is
telling them to f-off.

Also, this isn't just losing Steam: wine apps with 32 bit installers is a
major source of software.

I know personally I actually do want to use a Linux distro now that Unity 3D
support is coming, and Ubuntu would have been my first choice, but I know I'm
definitely going elsewhere now :-/

~~~
bb88
1% could also be seen as a blip in the signal. You might lose that 1%, but by
concentrating on the 99% you might gain 2-5% more year over year.

~~~
suby
I cannot possibly imagine that this would result in a net gain of users.

------
fabian2k
One big issue from what I read are installers for Windows software running in
WINE. The installers are often still 32bit, and without 32bit support they
won't work anymore. So even if the actual Windows application is 64bit, you
can't run it in WINE because you can't install it.

This doesn't really surprise me, one big specialized software I used a while
ago couldn't be installed under Windows 7 64bit because the installer still
was 16bit. I don't think anyone wants to touch a still working installer
unless they have to, so they stay behind in technology.

~~~
rvp-x
Worth noting that removing 16bit support in windows is an enormous security
win, because the DOS stuff relied on things that are really bad for security.
32-bit support is a lot more sustainable.

~~~
asveikau
Citation needed. 16 bit code is fairly well isolated in NT-based Windows.

~~~
yegle
Wiki suggest 16bit of Address Space Layer Randomization can be bruteforced in
minutes, citing source:

Shacham, H.; Page, M.; Pfaff, B.; Goh, E.J.; Modadugu, N.; Boneh, D (2004). On
the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomization. 11th ACM conference on
Computer and communications security. pp. 298–307.

~~~
asveikau
Nobody expects aslr from 16 bit legacy code with only 1mb of address space. I
think you are describing 16 bits of randomization on a 32 or 64 bit process
though.

What I mean is that the virtualization of 16 bit code (using vm86) is isolated
from a security perspective, it won't violate process boundaries or kernel
security features like ACLs. I believe this was less true in 9x which might be
where the confusion comes from.

------
FrozenVoid
32-bit closed source software won't be suddenly recompiled to satisfy some
open source purity standard. People will stop using Ubuntu for games - and
"linux has no games" will be a strong argument again. Gaming is a huge issue
on linux that only recently was solved with Steam+Proton and Ubuntu team just
decided to screw with it. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

~~~
zamadatix
Or people will just get it as a snap.

~~~
michaelmrose
In a format that will be as dead as unity, mir, ubuntu phone, and upstart in a
few years.

Nothing that ubuntu strikes out on their own with ever works out.

~~~
deniska
upstart was an rhel thing

~~~
jononor
Upstart was originally developed by Canonical. Several years after it shipped
in Ubuntu, it was shipped in RHEL6. RHEL7 replaced it with systemd. While it
probably had some RedHat contributions, to call it a RHEL thing does not make
much sense.

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kibwen
Now that the WinRT scare has passed and Valve no longer fears Microsoft
imposing an App Store-style hegemony over Windows, Valve has little external
incentive to continue maintaining tools targeted at Linux users. The life raft
is no longer strategically valuable, and 19.10 is a convenient cover for
spinning down Ubuntu support. I wouldn't be surprised if this is followed up
in a few months' time by an announcement that the internal Linux team is being
dissolved altogether.

~~~
jonny_eh
Supporting Linux also inadvertently helped Google Stadia.

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mpartel
I wonder if this statement is mostly an attempt to get Ubuntu to reverse
course. It seems unwise to pull support from the most popular distro if it
could be supported with additional technical effort, such as bundling the
libraries with Steam. Of course that's effort that Valve would likely prefer
to spend elsewhere.

~~~
wolco
I think Ubuntu will lose its status as most popular distro after 19.

~~~
asark
This whole thing has been pretty funny.

Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they
just work.

Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video
games!

Valve: ...

~~~
pkaye
I think honestly Canonical is just "pulling a Redhat". Redhat walked away 20
years ago from the consumer market to focus on the server market (Fedora came
much later.) Server is where they make money. They don't get any money out the
video game market. The users don't give them any money. Neither does Valve.
Nor the game developers. Nor the hardware developers. They need money to
develop and maintain stuff and grow. They might reconsider if there is push
from the server customers though.

~~~
kurtisc
My employer uses Ubuntu for most developers, meaning all our software is
designed to work on the latest LTS Ubuntu and we (I assume) pay a significant
amount for support. But the only reason we use Ubuntu is because it's more
familiar to the average developer than RHEL.

~~~
pkaye
So ask your employer to convey an interest in maintaining the 32-bit library.

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WhatIsDukkha
As I mentioned in the other thread.

I've switched to flatpak steam, works well and its working towards the sandbox
this stuff should be in.

[https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam)

For wine itself -

[https://winepak.org/](https://winepak.org/)

------
CorvusCrypto
I'm fine with this, but it is a bit annoying to see a developer not deal with
64-bit builds. I wonder if it's only because Windows allows them to be lazy
while it generates more money for them?

Either way I think valve's Linux team should rethink this. They depend on
32-bit libs, but Surely they can find alternatives for the 64-bit build and
who knows it might even make the experience on Linux even better.

~~~
captainbland
My guess is that there are a lot of third party developed games which only
work on 32-bit compatible systems and Valve either doesn't know exactly which
ones are which or simply doesn't want to put the effort into organising them
such that users are warned about which specific games have incompatibilities.
The other option is just letting the games that would only work on 32-bit
compatible systems fail with cryptic error messages and have to field masses
of complaints about it while looking extremely unprofessional in the process.
In this case it's not that surprising that they would just decide to drop
support, especially considering that Ubuntu is a relatively small chunk of the
market to begin with.

It's pretty unfortunate. I totally get Canonical's desire to get rid of the
seemingly unnecessary bloat and maintenance burden from having to support
32-bit applications but this is the consequence and it's a big blow to gaming
on Ubuntu, especially seeing as Steam has only been supported on Ubuntu since
2013.

~~~
sunstone
Ubuntu makes its money from server and enterprise clients. If Valve needs to
support 16/32 bit for its customers then it's up to them to do it. I expect
Valve is a much bigger company than Ubuntu, maybe Valve can contract out this
work to ... Ubuntu instead of just freeloading.

~~~
ilikehurdles
Valve has contributed a ton of work to Ubuntu/Linux. They’ve pretty much
single handedly turned around Linux gaming to the point where I can safely
expect most windows-exclusive games on steam will run smoothly on Ubuntu.
Freeloading couldn’t be farther from the truth.

~~~
cheez
> They’ve pretty much single handedly turned around Linux gaming to the point
> where I can safely expect most windows-exclusive games on steam will run
> smoothly on Ubuntu.

Wait... What? When did this happen?

~~~
zwerdlds
It's called Proton and the repo is here:
[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton)

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bangonkeyboard
What about macOS Catalina, which also drops 32-bit support and has already
caused games to become unavailable?

~~~
empyrical
If they are dropping Ubuntu 19.10 over lack of 32 bit support, it's probable
that they're going to drop support for Catalina and up as well. I don't think
they've made a statement yet, however.

~~~
faho
Dropping support for Catalina would be akin to dropping support for macOS
entirely, while dropping support for Ubuntu is not the same as dropping
support for linux.

In fact Valve already have their own distro, and it's not based on Ubuntu.

~~~
empyrical
Hmm, I've done some googling and it looks like Valve has a 64 bit version of
Steam for macOS already. You may need to delete Steam.app and re-install to
get it. So you will still be able to use Steam itself on Catalina+, but will
need to wait for 32bit only games to have a 64 bit version made available (or
for someone to come up with some kind of compatibility tool)

------
JohnTHaller
Quite a lot of games on Linux rely on Wine to run. They are 32-bit Windows
games packaged up with a 32-bit version of Wine. The 64-bit version of Wine
still has quite a few bugs and really shouldn't be used for commercially sold
software. Valve is making the correct decision here based on Ubuntu dropping
32-bit support.

[https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_there_a_64_bit_Wine.3F](https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_there_a_64_bit_Wine.3F)

[https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=win64&resolutio...](https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=win64&resolution=---)

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davemp
I’m not sure why valve doesn’t just ship a 64bit client with their own
compatibility layer(s).

There’s a lot of problems on various linux distros hunting down and setting up
the correct 32bit libs. Windows is fine for obvious reasons, but valve already
seems to want to move to a more platform independent approach.

~~~
m45t3r
Valve already ships the equivalente of a whole Ubuntu 12.04 32-bits included
in Steam to be used by games.

I would really like if Valve could move Steam to use Flatpak or some other
thing instead. Their bundled libraries are a mess and lots of time doesn't
work correctly.

~~~
dylan-m
Someone even made an unofficial flatpak for Steam, too. It's on Flathub and it
works great for my needs. Makes perfect sense with the way Valve packages
Steam already, since they try really hard to provide the same environment on
every distro. The only problem I have with it is you can't easily add
additional library folders due to the sandboxing. (Need Valve themselves to
add portals to the application code so Steam can pop up a native file chooser
which grants access to whatever file the user chooses, and there's no
directory tree portal anyway … yet). But that's solvable. Much better, long
term, than Valve stubbornly clinging to whatever distro continues to build for
an obsolete architecture at their own expense.

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morsch
I'm running Steam on a 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04. What changes with 19.10? I figured
Canonical was only announcing the end of the i386 installer; presumably this
is not about that?

~~~
masterchill
They are dropping 32-bit app support entirely.

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peter_retief
I moved to Debian, increasingly found Ubuntu to be problematic

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tolger
This kinda sucks for me, as a Linux based developer who’s also a gamer. I’ve
been gaming on Steam with the Proton compatibility layer, and most of my
Windows-only games work flawlessly. If future Ubuntu upgrades break this, then
I won’t upgrade until I find another solution.

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unixhero
So a switch to OpenSuse or Fedora would make sense perhaps. I had a great time
trying out OpenSuse.

~~~
badsectoracula
Which one between openSUSE and Fedora is the most community driven? I'd rather
see them break away from targeting a Linux distribution that is mainly funded
from a company that gets their income from servers/cloud. They need to either
go with a distro that has a desktop oriented company behind or with a distro
that is community driven.

~~~
0815test
Valve is currently maintaining SteamOS which is based on Debian, so why
wouldn't they want to go with that? The Steam client is already in the Debian
non-free repository.

~~~
unixhero
Hey what can I say. Good point!

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qbaqbaqba
Well done, Linux as a gaming platform will be dead.

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aNoob7000
If this does happen and Valve pulls support for Steam on Ubuntu, I'm probably
going back to Windows. This news is depressing since I've been a happy Ubuntu
user for about a year now.

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walkingolof
Wonder if this is really a problem in a few years, most gaming will probably
stream from services like Google Stadia, gaming will be OS agnostic

~~~
Nullabillity
I certainly don't want to live in that dystopia.

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CydeWeys
The first consumer 64 bit processors came out a decade and a half ago. Why is
legacy 32 bit still a thing? It's not like anyone can say they haven't had
_ample_ warning time that 32 bit deprecation was coming.

~~~
cyborgx7
Video games are more media than they are software. Sadly their format is
software but their release is media. Old games aren't actively supported and
won't be updated. You need to ensure some kind of compatibility with 32 bit
software or drop a huge amount of support for games. And if you don't, the
video game industry will probably drop you.

I think you will probably need some kind of compatibility wrapper you can wrap
32 bit binaries in that will make it compatible with 64 bit systems.

~~~
needle0
This. Games are done when they're done; much like finished novels, films, or
music, once the developer considers it done, it won't get updated anymore.
Also likewise to film or music, if it ends up becoming a classic, it might get
remastered or remade a decade or two later, but those are the exceptions
rather than the norm. The vast majority of games will just stay like when they
were originally made, much like the majority of novels, music, and film.

