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Steam beta gets native Apple Silicon support — the only public Arm version of Steam
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Apple not keeping legacy cruft is why they were able to move to ARM so quickly. For all the grumbling about cutting 32-bit support couple of years ago, this is what allowed them to do that (among other things). And, as demonstrated, developers like Valve take action only when they are forced to. Windows and Linux on ARM are stuck in the mud with no end in sight while Apple is almost done with the transition.
Linux on ARM is stuck in the mud? Huh? Everything works fine on ARM, including the desktop. There are like a billion ARM devices running Linux right now.
Or did you mean Linux on Apple hardware? Because that's by design.
Since we’re talking about Steam here for example, Valve have not even bothered to release a 64-bit x86 client, let alone Arm client, except for Mac.
Right, I'm not talking about Steam, I don't think misk was either, the context is Apple transitioning to ARM silicon.
Also Steam definitely runs native 64 bit on x64 systems. It's intended to run in either environment, and so will have 32 bit deps, but if you start Steam, the actual executables you're running (e.g. ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper) are 64 bit ELFs when needed. And, of course, games run in 64 bits and link to a 64 bit steam client library.
Steam for Linux is mixed 32/64, unfortunately the main executable (~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam) and its associated steamclient library continues to be 32-bit only and runs with a couple of horribly dated libraries in the mix. That process does pretty much everything aside from the UI.
I mean, yeah, that's what happens when you still want to be 32 bit compatible. It's also why I said they were ELF64 when needed. My only point was that it's not like Valve just shipped a bunch of 32 bit binaries and called it a day or x64 support was some kind of after thought that needs future support.
Oh really? Nice, that's news to me. Last I checked (admittedly not recently) it needed a bunch of 32-bit libraries installed to even start the client.