Valve will continue to support Ubuntu on Steam, but will begin to cooperate with other distributions

In connection with revision by Canonical
plans on deprecating 32-bit x86 support in the next release of Ubuntu, Valve saidthat it will likely keep Ubuntu support on Steam, despite previously stated intention stop official support. Canonical's decision to ship 32-bit libraries will allow the development of Steam for Ubuntu to continue without negatively impacting users of that distribution, despite Valve's general dissatisfaction with the policy to remove existing functionality from distributions.

At the same time, Valve will begin to work more closely with the manufacturers of many Linux distributions. Among the distributions that provide good support for running computer games in their user environments are Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, and Fedora. The specific list of distributions supported on Steam will be announced later. Valve is ready to cooperate with any distributions and invites them to contact the company directly to start working together. Valve also remains committed to the idea of ​​development
Linux as a gaming platform and will continue to work on improving drivers and developing new features to improve the experience of gaming applications and graphical environments in all Linux distributions.

Explaining their position on 32-bit application support in distributions, it is noted that 32-bit mode support is not so much important for the Steam client itself, but for the thousands of games in the Steam catalog that ship only in 32-bit builds. The Steam client itself is not difficult to adapt to run in 64-bit environments, but this will not solve the problem of running 32-bit games that will not work without an additional layer to ensure compatibility. One of the key principles of Steam is that the user who bought the games must retain the ability to run them, so splitting the library into 32-bit and 64-bit games is unacceptable.

Steam already provides a large set of dependencies for 32-bit games, but this is not enough as it requires at least 32-bit Glibc, bootloader, Mesa, and NVIDIA graphics driver libraries. Isolated container solutions can be used to provide the necessary 32-bit components in distributions that do not have them, but they will fundamentally change the runtime environment and probably cannot be delivered to users without breaking the mold.

Source: opennet.ru