32-bit RIP

I just wanted to chime in with regards to this "issue".

While I do believe 32-bit will eventually go the way of the DoDo, it is indeed an issue right here and now, and one you see every single day in places like Ubuntu fora and Steam Linux forum, especially coming from new users, who get really, really confused about this 32-bit libs in a 64-bit OS conundrum, and it stems from a poorly done decision made back in like 2004 or even prior, when x86_64 (AMD64 later EMT64 on Intel) was being initially deployed by the different distros, especially from the Debian camp (yes, you can throw your bombs my way now).

What do I mean? Poor multilib... The way they initially implemented (and a la C++ got immediately inherited by all its offspring, like *buntu/Mint/you-name-it) for some strange reason I have not been able to even fathom, stuck throughout all these years.

I'm not saying "My distro is better than yours" in any way, but the way they did things, sure makes things even more difficult to support (and Pedro may remember this from the initial Fedora releases) as infrastructure... (glibc, gcc-lib, mesa-dri-drivers, mesa-libGL, proprietary driver libs, SDL*, etc)

It should not (and most likely won't) be an issue to support a set of "Core" packages comprising the basic support for older 32-bit only applications (most prominently games).

Alas, this has its roots in the freaking lack of standards we suffer in the Open Source (or rather GNU/Linux) user land (Maybe *BSDs do not have as a large user base to expose this?). At any rate, failure such as that from LSB which on paper is such a good idea, but in the end nobody but a few distributions picked up, but few really stood by it, and the many other efforts made in order to try and "unify" the different projects (even FreeDesktop.org failed at some point) so that both user experience _and_ developer experience would be better have miserably failed... Iroinically enough, is just this conundrum which has pushed this ecosystem beyond many limits and is also one of its biggest drags... Especially for corporate, enterprise and commercial software (one of the reasons why RHL [you know, the grandpa of RHEL] and friends seem to be so limiting, in regards to more "Rebel" distros such as Debian).

From this you can pick whichever dichotomy fits your bill: RPM Vs Deb Vs tar.[b,g]z Vs .tgz; Vim Vs Emacs, GNOME Vs KDE (Vs Unity Vs Cinnamon Vs Mate Vs XFCE Vs Enlightenment Vs LXDE Vs IceWM Vs Open[Flux]Box Vs WindowMaker Vs XWM), Compiz Vs Mutter Vs KWin, X11 Vs Wayland Vs Mir, Xine Vs VLC Vs MPlayer, Krita Vs GIMP, xine-lib Vs ffmpeg Vs gstreamer, VDPAU Vs VAAPI Vs Xv[m], GTK Vs Qt Vs TCL-TK Vs Athena... and a BIG list of etc (soon you'll be able to add OpenGL Vs Vulkan in there in the near future, hopefully)...
- Gian