I’m 100% going to call this fearmongering and headline chasing. Good job OP, you got me.
You use Debian.
It’s the same thing you do if you want to support old hardware or if you want a solid stable system. (IE, kernel stability)
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Good to know.
Definitely no sentimentality towards an Atom N270. At least not of the positive variety! haha
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It feels fair that I finally give an answer…
Let’s see, eoan announced the absolute end of 32bit support and thought it wasn’t a big deal…
Then one of their devs tried to run GoG Games on 19.10…
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Trying-GOG-Games-64-bit-Ubuntu
(Spoilers: It did not go well)
And now Steam is officially dropping support for Ubuntu 19.10 and up. Meaning only Debian, Arch, and Fedora are officially supported moving forward:
That’s the uncertainty. And it’s becoming truer every day.
Manjaro unfortunately is a noob-trap OS and if you’re at the point of vanilla Debian, you may as well use SteamOS.
I also want to address the “GNOME Third Party Repositories” thing… That’s GNOME ONLY, I use a Fedora spin in the form of it’s KDE spin so that doesn’t apply, so it would only be through DNF anyways. I seem to have tamed it though.
For the vast majority of users they all use gnome. It’s the default. But if you read the fedora page for this you’ll have seen the option is there to install via command line as well, it’s the same repo as clicking the UI button.
The difference here is these repos are being distributed by fedora as official options, and if your using the default fedora install is super simple to use.
I’m just gonna tame my DNF the same way I’ve always tamed it. My Fedora 28 install is now stable and tame and if I don’t use Nvidia and Blackmagic, like on a Ryzen laptop, that’s when I would allow all packages to update as is… but for Nvidia and Blackmagic, since I manually install for the Vulkan driver and a stable set of Blackmagic Desktop Video drivers, DNF taming is the only way.
Also, yes, I know Pop!_OS said they will support 32bit but I want to see that in practice to avoid falling into a trap. They already went Systemd boot making VFIO harder.
I tried the flatpak steam for a while and passed through an external path for a steam download library.
Now I just use the native fedora steam client. Only game that doesnt work is Civ VI and the support staff gave me the expansion for free as a sorry. I prefer civ V.
On an aside not even in proton with DX 11 or 12 Civ VI crashes on Fedora. I guess they need to learn to code. As Every other game works native or with proton for me.
It’s weird because Overwatch via Lutris or Wine for the longest time was unstable in Fedora only. And it still might be.
Does this apply for KDE by any chance? Or does KDE not put NVidia’s proprietary drivers?
Fedora is Fedora, the spins just install different desktops or tools by default. The repos can be installed with dnf as well, the instructions are here. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Third_Party_Software_Repositories
Or you can also use rpmfusion full repo.
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So, games is the issue? Doesn’t steam have a runtime for exactly this reason?
Isnt steam itself still 32 bit? 
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Uhh, no idea. Again with problematic developers.
Anyways, I dont think its a big deal. It has to be done eventually. Making wayland the default also didnt mean xorg is impossible to install. And you could just not install the version where 32bit is dropped until things work out fine.
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Uh oh.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-31-Possible-AVX2-Require
NOPE. Guess a Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS guide would be better considering this is what’s planned.
Curious what kind of performance gain we can expect from that move. But Fedora is pretty bleeding edge if you need more legacy support or a more LTS type of OS you should be looking at centos. That is if you wanna keep using a RHEL type of distro.
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Yes.
You can use Debian for new hardware, too. It is good enough for SteamOS it is good enough for me.
FWIW, Debian and Fedora are the only two distros I’ve been able to play non-Valve games on. Can’t get Steam installed on Arch and Ubuntu acts funny. Not funny haha, but the other kind of funny ¬_¬
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Much ado about nothing.
That proposal is by one RedHat employee (Florian Weimer) and virtually everyone’s reaction is that it’s a really stupid idea. See the Discussion tab on the proposal’s wiki page and the mailing list and the phoronix article comments.
Not a snowball’s chance in hell.
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I don’t have a big problem with this. If you’re running 7+ year old hardware, maybe you should be running a distro aimed at old hardware (maybe perhaps a legacy support spin rather than official distro).
Carrying old compatibility forwards when the source is available slows progress. I’d rather have the battery life and performance benefits thanks. And including BOTH code-paths in the executables in order to carry old hardware will just bloat the OS and make it run worse on old boxes (due to code-size blow out) anyway. So re-spin…
Offer a non-avx2 re-spin, let third party application developers decide to take advantage of it or not… but default should be to encourage progress imho.
Several comments point out that there is new, recent hardware lacking AVX2, such as Atom and I think Pentium processors.
Given Fedora is aimed at being a “development workstation” distribution (to quote their site), i’m not sure that Atom and Pentium are their target platform…