Huh, I didn't know gifs could have audio.

I assume we'll still need the 32 bit libraries to play 32 bit games, which at this point is probably just older games that will never be updated. I guess it depends on what you like to play, but I'll be stuck with them for some time yet.

You still won't get rid off xwayland because there are native linux games that use X11, but xwayland can be moved from compositor into xwayland-satellite thing

Technically Proton supports Wayland. It's just not the default. You can override it with a launch flag to use Wayland.

Each "bit" in the architecture is mainly related to how many different memory positions you can address with a CPU opcode (i.e. an assembly command) that needs to access memory or with a CPU register that holds an memory address (so an 8 bit register can only address 256 memory positions, a 16 bit one 65,538 memory positions, a 32 bit one 4,294,967,296 memory positions and so on) - basically every additional bit in the register size of a CPU that addresses memory roughly doubles the memory that CPU can access and thus use (not considering hacks to go around those limits, such as the Spectrum 128K had).

Meanwhile Moore's Law predicts that "the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years" which for integrated circuits roughly means that every two years the amount of memory that can be in the same integrated circuit area doubles.

So if Moore's Law kept working, each architecture bit roughly gives you two more years until the availability of memory catches up- This means that the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures per Moore's Law gave us 64 years until we have to move to an architecture with more bits because memory available is so big that CPUs are unable to use so much memory.

Were we are now, 64 bits is enough to address 8 Exabytes of memory.

That said, extrapolating from the current trend in growth of memory in PCs, we will reach the point when we will start hitting the constraints of that in ... NEVER - thanks to the AI bubble the newer PCs are coming out with the same or less memory than the previous generation, so the trend of available memory is not upwards but downwards.

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.

No. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/13015

wrong, instead it is still 32 bit

With this first part of your sentence you are directly contradicting the words in the primary source, so do you have good evidence for this?

For reference here's the relevant part from the primary source:

Linux

• The Steam client is now a 64bit application.
• The Steam client now runs inside a Steam Runtime container.
  • This will help the Steam client provide a more consistent experience across multiple distributions. This is the same technology used by Steam games.

The benefit to/for Steam itself is marginal. The benefit to the entire community is significant, because there's now an entire metric shitload of obsolete 32-bit shit that can be safely deleted and forgotten for 95% of the Linux world and efforts can be focused on things that actually matter in the 64-bit world. The entire 32-bit ecosystem of libraries and system layers still had to be maintained and supported basically only for Steam's sake, Steam was the only thing still using them for the vast majority of people. It's not that Steam needs 64-bit, it's that 64-bit is the standard now and has been for a long time, and Steam was the only thing that had no 64-bit version.

It's kind of like cutting loose the anchor that the community has been dragging around everywhere for years for no purpose. It was a totally unnecessary effort that just caused suffering and added no value.

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.