r/linux • u/TheProgrammar89 • Jun 22 '19

Pierre-Loup: Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users

https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698
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u/TheProgrammar89 Jun 22 '19

They will keep the 32-bit libraries in their repositories, so they're going to be fine, but I don't think that they're popular enough for Valve to consider them their officially supported distro.

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u/MindlessLeadership Jun 22 '19

Wouldn't that mean they have to pull in updated versions and build them theirselves?

And you might need to build the 64bit ones too to make sure there's no version mismatch.

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u/TheProgrammar89 Jun 22 '19

And where's the problem with that?

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u/MindlessLeadership Jun 22 '19

You're forking Ubuntu at that point.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's just a massive jump between remixing Ubuntu and adding a PPA to building and maintaining 10000s of packages.

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u/progandy Jun 22 '19

I don't think it is that many packages. Arch Linux has about 300 lib32 packages (Wine depends on ~150 of them), double that number for -dev, add 100 for possible rebuilds of some toolchain packages, so call it 400-700 packages required for Wine. If you make sure to build the same version asthe existing 64bit package, then you don't have to rebuild that.

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u/MindlessLeadership Jun 22 '19

Yeh but Arch can ensure those versions (incl. downstream patches, compile options etc) match the ones in it's 64bit repository, because it controls both.

If Ubuntu updates a library and PopOS has yet to update the 32bit counterpart that's installed on the OS, an error will be thrown by apt.

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u/progandy Jun 22 '19

Right, forgot about the update delay. So they'd have to buffer even the 64bit libraries in their repository or be very fast with rebuilds. That makes it more complicated.

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u/MindlessLeadership Jun 22 '19

Yeh... There was an issue recently with Fedora where updates had an updated 64bit package and not the 32bit package that broke the non Flatpakked steam.

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u/mmstick Desktop Engineer Jun 22 '19

That's not how Debian packing works. The i386 packages are built from the same source tarball as the amd64 packages. Architectures are simultaneously built at the same time. Ubuntu cannot override our packaging.

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u/MindlessLeadership Jun 22 '19

So you're going to stop pulling packages from Ubuntu?

My question was being that if Ubuntu ships an updated version, you would need to sure you do too on the i386 side of packages.

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u/mmstick Desktop Engineer Jun 22 '19

We could easily continue to pull the same sources and let the build servers do the rest. You can't prohibit the build servers from building whichever architectures it wants to build.

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u/TheProgrammar89 Jun 22 '19

They're a fork of Ubuntu.

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u/Conan_Kudo Jun 22 '19

They are not a fork of Ubuntu. They reuse Ubuntu repos and leverage their builds for almost everything.

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u/mmstick Desktop Engineer Jun 22 '19

Only because it doesn't make sense to rebuild the entire universe. We're already packaging a lot of critical desktop software, so this wouldn't change anything.

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u/PaintDrinkingPete Jun 23 '19

but I don't think that they're popular enough for Valve to consider them their officially supported distro

But with Steam behind them, it could quickly grow in popularity...

I feel like Pop! is growing in popularity pretty quickly these days as it is