While the number of gaming titles being made available on Linux is increasing each month, it’s widely accepted that gaming remains one of the weakest points of all Linux based operating systems. There are options like Pop!_OS, Manjaro, etc., that deliver considerably better performance, but they’re also heavily dependent on the Valve-owned Steam game distribution platform.
Just recently, we reported Ubuntu’s plans to completely drop the support for 32-bit packages. Earlier, during the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, Canonical announced its plans to ditch the 32-bit installation images. Along the similar lines, Canonical had also disabled the upgrades from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.10.
Steam drops official Ubuntu support
As a result, starting with Ubuntu 19.10 the packages won’t be built for 32-bit architecture. This has inspired Valve to officially stop officially supporting Ubuntu Linux.
Well-known Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed the same via a tweet —
Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users. We will evaluate ways to minimize breakage for existing users, but will also switch our focus to a different distribution, currently TBD.
— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) June 22, 2019
The tweet mentions that Valve is in the process of evaluating means to minimize the breakage for the current Steam users. Further, they also plan to shift their focus to a different Linux distribution like Debian GNU/Linux.
In a related development, Alan Pope of Canonical tried running some GOG games on Ubuntu 19.10 Daily Build. However, his experience didn’t go as smoothly as he expected. You can read his complete experience in this post.
