The GNOME Project has discontinued development, maintenance, and support for the "org.gnome.Platform.i386.Compat" extension, used by GNOME Flatpak Runtime to provide compatibility with 32-bit applications. This extension provided 32-bit versions of GTK and the GNOME libraries used to ship 32-bit applications in flatpak packages suitable for installation on 64-bit distributions that have discontinued shipping 32-bit libraries (multilib). GNOME Flatpak Runtime is now available only for the x86_64 and AArch64 architectures.
The most popular 32-bit programs delivered in flatpak format are Wine and Steam. It is noted that the end of support for the 32-bit GNOME Flatpak Runtime will not affect these packages, as they do not use 32-bit builds of GTK 4, libadwaita, or WebkitGTK.
The reason cited for ending support for 32-bit systems is the desire to relieve the continuous integration infrastructure and address issues arising from developers' insufficient testing of projects on 32-bit systems before committing changes to the repository. Situations arise where crashes that only manifest on 32-bit systems block changes from being merged into GNOME repositories. Furthermore, rebuilding places additional strain on the resource-constrained infrastructure, as each module requires rebuilding the entire GNOME framework from Git at least twice a day, as well as rebuilding WebKitGTK, the mozjs engine, and several Rust libraries and applications.
The resulting crashes are frustrating for developers, who have to spend their time maintaining builds that are rarely used. It turns out that the 32-bit GNOME Flatpak Runtime in the Flathub directory uses only two packages, plus one package in Flathub Beta. Change requests have been sent to the developers of these applications, updating them to the main GNOME 49 Runtime. The change request for Bottles is almost ready for merge, but for Lutris and Minigalaxy, it still requires some work.
It is also noted that after the discontinuation of GNOME Runtime builds for the armv7 and i386 architectures, 32-bit platforms are no longer used in quality testing before GNOME releases. While developers could previously guarantee that all GNOME modules would compile for the i386/x86 architecture, the situation has now changed, and testing is performed at the discretion of the developers of each individual module. Fixing issues specific to 32-bit systems is now optional for maintainers. Distributions shipping 32-bit GNOME builds must perform testing and fixing issues for most projects themselves.
Source: opennet.ru
