Don’t care. When will it obey window manager hints like every well mannered software does?
Anyone know why it took so long? Wasn’t important?
Wine couldn’t run 32 bit games without 32 bit libraries. They added experimental support for WoW64 a few years ago and now it’s considered stable. There was probably just no rush to make Steam 64 bit if it still needed 32 bit libraries for older games.
I asked WINE devs for WOW64 support back in XP 64-bit days. They argued about it and said no lol. Good to see it finally landed 20 years later.
The advantage to Steam going 64-bit is that most people can now remove all their 32-bit libraries.
Previously you needed 32-bit libraries for most of the actual games you ran through Steam, so it didn’t really matter if Steam used them too.
The Steam client didn’t work as a compatibility layer though. It doesn’t really involve the client. Proton is the compatibility layer and it’s capable to dealing with the emulation
Kinda funny to think that I won’t be living through any more migrations to the next power of 2. They happened so rapidly at first.
Moore’s Law finally caught up with our ability to make rocks calculate for us. It was going to happen eventually, I find it somewhat comforting that hardware has finally plateaued, and will only get incremental changes for a while. It means that the next computer I build, I can expect it to last for multiple decades, rather than just one.
640 bit ought to be enough for everyone!
Noob question here, but what’s the benefit of moving an application like Steam to 64bit? I understand for memory intensive applications it allows for more memory usage (it was a big deal when Stellaris made the change) but does Steam often use more than 4 GB of memory?
One of the reasons Steam held out for so long was that a lot of the games they host are 32-bit only. Games are built by a company, many of which have gone belly-up, so rebuilding the game from scratch is impossible. Making Steam 32 bit even though it could be 64 bit is a really effective way to guarantee a large chunk of their legacy products will still run. In a lot of ways, because of the nature of the gaming industry, Steam has it worse than most package managers/app stores.
I don’t think it works like that. 64 bit Steam can manage 32 bit games just like a 64 bit OS can run 32 bit games.
I’m not sure as that’s about Steam the client though not on Proton thus Wine, which I bet will keep on supporting 32bit apps.
Remember that the portion of Steam users that use Proton regularly is less than 10%, if you include Deck users. That number is rising and is probably a major factor in the decision to switch, but it’s still a minority.
It still doesn’t matter for the Steam client. All it does is point to games and tell them to boot. The client itself doesn’t act as a compatibility layer so the 32-bit vs 64-bit game argument isn’t relevant
