The past few days have seen a strong response from the Linux community, who were not happy about Fedora's plan to drop 32-bit support with the upcoming Fedora 44 release.
The proposal sparked heated debates across forums and social media, with many users voicing concerns over how it would affect gaming, legacy hardware, and Fedora-based projects.
Things got so tense that the founder of Bazzite spoke out publicly, highlighting how the change could negatively impact their user base and future development plans.
Luckily, after receiving feedback from the community, the proposal has been dropped.
32-bit Support Stays, For Now
Fabio Valentini, a Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) member, has formally withdrawn the proposal to discontinue 32-bit support in Fedora. The proposal, originally targeted for Fedora 44, aimed to address the increasing technical challenges in maintaining 32-bit compatibility across the distribution.
Acknowledging the backlash, Fabio admitted that the target for this change was too early and pointed out that the technical problems mentioned in the proposal are not going away.
He added that:
I don’t think the problem that was attempted to be addressed with this proposal will go away. With more and more projects dropping official support for building / running their software on 32-bit architectures, it’s just going to get worse over the next few years.
Fabio also said that he was disappointed by some of the reactions. He felt that people misunderstood the proposal and saw it in a more negative way than intended, and that it was meant to solve technical issues, not some conspiracy to break gaming use cases.
In the end, I figured this would be the end result of the proposal, and I get that 32-bit support in Fedora won’t last forever, and that’s okay. The good thing here is that Fedora-based distros like Bazzite and people who rely on 32-bit now have plenty of time to prepare for when that day eventually comes.
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