Steam and Linux gaming is safe: Fedora will not drop 32-bit support after all — dev says proposal was 'not some conspiracy to break the gaming use case'

The developers behind the Fedora Linux distribution have officially withdrawn their proposal to drop 32-bit support from the OS after severe backlash from the community. Discovered by GamingOnLinux, Fabio Valentini, a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, clarified in a discussion thread that 32-bit removal from Fedora 44 was "just the earliest 'reasonable' target" and wasn't a plan he fully expected to go through.

The programmer was disappointed by the sheer number of commenters responding harshly to the change, saying, "I was expecting a lot of feedback on this one, but not hundreds of people shouting 'DON’T DO THIS, WHY DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR USERS, I WILL SWITCH DISTROS IMMEDIATELY levels of feedback."

The backlash stemmed from reports that the change could potentially undermine support for gaming service Steam. The developer said the proposal to eliminate 32-bit support was "...not some conspiracy to break the 'gaming use case'." Valentini clarified that the proposal aimed to address specific technical issues that package maintainers and release engineers encounter with Fedora.

"I am disappointed in some of the reactions this !! proposal !! has received, with some people apparently reading it in the most uncharitable way," the developer said.

The programmer still believes in the proposal, noting that keeping 32-bit support around won't make the problems the proposal attempted to eliminate go away. 32-bit support is rapidly declining in the industry, and moving Fedora to 64-bit exclusively will give Fedora maintainers and developers more breathing room to work on more important things in the operating system. "Dealing with widely used software falling out from under our feet won’t be fun," Valetini said in regards to keeping 32-bit support around for now.

No timeline was provided for when the proposal might be reconsidered. But, given that 32-bit support is being dropped by many software developers in the industry—even Windows 11 no longer ships with a 32-bit version—there's little doubt that Fedora will eventually drop 32-bit support, regardless of the circumstances.

Fedora made headlines last week when the distribution's maintainers announced the proposal to remove 32-bit packages from the upcoming version, Fedora 44. The news startled gamers, as the change had the potential to impact support for Steam, which still relies on 32-bit code, potentially hurting the PC gaming user base running on Fedora. Worse still, the change would also allegedly force SteamOS clone Bazzite to shut down entirely for the same reasons. For now, those users and projects get a reprieve.