Valve will continue to support Ubuntu and work with more distros

Valve says it is highly likely that it will continue to support Ubuntu with Steam, now that Canonical has rolled back the end of 32bit support for Ubuntu 19.10. The game company will work with more distribution managers.

Valve expresses its commitment to continue to support Linux as a gaming platform. The company lists Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Fedora “and many others” as Linux distros that offer a good gaming experience today. Valve asks developers of Linux distributions who want to work together to get in touch. However, the company does not disclose which distros it will officially support.

Valve explains in a blog why 32bit support is important for Steam and why it announced last week that it would no longer support Ubuntu from version 19.10. That message came after Canonical announced that 32-bit support would be discontinued from that version. That announcement came in for a lot of criticism, especially from the Linux gaming community. Canonical then decided to reverse its decision and continue to support 32bit.

Not only the Steam client requires 32bit support but also thousands of games on the platform, Valve describes. It is possible to run the Steam client in a 64bit environment, but without additional layers of compatibility, much of the game selection on Steam would no longer be available to users, which Valve calls unacceptable.

Steam on Linux requires 32bit glibc, ELF loader, Mesa and Nvidia drivers among others. Valve has been looking at using containers to stop relying on 32-bit components for some time, but a switch wouldn’t be possible before the release of Ubuntu 19.10. In the long run, Canonical also wants to move to containers to continue offering 32bit support.