85
Good. Breaking old games unnecessarily is not an option.
More people need to take this into account.
Even until semi-recently a lot games were 32bit only. Luckily we got projects like WOW64 for Wine/Proton that's helping assure compatibility of older games in the future when 32bit libraries are completely dropped by most distros. But that still takes time to work out all the edge cases.
Same thing for the people heavily pushing for everyone to SWITCH TO ARM RIGHT NOW!
I like Arm (I'd prefer RISC-V) but I like video games being preserved, playable and as easily accessible as possible for people more than any shiny new hardware.
They wouldn't need to break anything. They could instead make the 32bit libraries optional, and show a warning if the user tries to play 32bit Linux game. The user would then have two options: Either play the Windows version through Proton, or install the missing libraries to play the Linux version.
Ideally a JIT system would be nice. I think there are a lot of people who would install them and not need it.
A compatibility layer translating 32 to 64bit calls would be the best option. Devs are right, keeping up multilib support is suboptimal. However those in the issue thread saying that "a majority of users want to get rid of 32bit libraries even if that makes old games not work" is just mad. A majority wants their games to god damn work optimally and do not care or even know about library issues. Even if Proton still works, it's one less option and the native one at that.
funny thing is that those old native 32bit games run like crap anyways, and windows version thru proton is almost always the way to go
staying for the foreseeable future
7 years and a few weeks left.
But I don't see «Agentic x64 Cleaners» anytime soon too anyways.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
85 points (98.9% liked)
Linux Gaming
27973 readers
1401 users here now
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
Resources
Help:
- ProtonDB
- Are We Anticheat Yet?
- r/linux_gaming FAQ
- Fork of an earlier version of the above
- PCGamingWiki
- LibreGameWiki
Launchers/Game Library Managers:
General:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS